Maya is a 3D content creation tool used to generate virtual characters,
environments, animations, and effects.
An essential part of content creation is the ability to manipulate
the characters and objects you’ve built.
In this movie, we’ll look at the different ways you can interact with objects in your scene.
You can select objects in your scene by clicking them.
You can add additional objects to your selection by holding Shift while clicking them.
Likewise, you can hold Ctrl and click objects to remove them from your selection.
Notice that as you add more objects to your selection,
only the most recently selected one highlights green.
The rest highlight white.
With the Select Tool, you can also drag the mouse cursor
to marquee select multiple objects at once...
…or you can change to the Lasso Tool to draw a more intricate marquee around your objects.
You can also select objects by name by using the "Persp/Outliner" Quick layout button
to open the Outliner.
The Outliner displays a list of all the objects in your scene,
such as geometry, lights, cameras and more.
You can quickly expand the Perspective view again
by placing the mouse cursor in the scene and tapping Spacebar.
Notice that if you tap Spacebar again,
it opens the Persp/Outliner layout instead of the Four View.
The Spacebar hotkey switches between filling the screen with the active panel,
or returning to the panel layout.
The Outliner is also available in the Window menu.
However, you cannot have both the Outliner window
and the Persp/Outliner layout active at the same time.
You can find specific objects by filtering based on their name.
If you only know part of the name,
you can also use the * wildcard to search for all objects with partial strings.
You can also filter the list by specific object types.
In this case, let’s specify we only want to view geometry objects.
Objects in the Outliner are arranged in trees based on their hierarchy.
In a hierarchy, objects are grouped in parent/child relationships.
For example, the various pieces of this rocket are children of the main rocket group.
While you can expand and collapse a tree one leaf at a time by clicking each of these +/- icons,
you can expand and collapse an entire tree at once
by holding Shift and clicking those same icons.
To learn more about scene hierarchy, see our movie on “Parenting and Grouping Objects”.
Thus far we’ve been working in Object mode, which selects entire shapes at once.
However, these shapes are actually made up of a combination of smaller components.
By holding the right-mouse button on an object,
you can view these components via the marking menu.
Right-dragging to any of these components, such as vertices, edges, and faces,
will change Maya to the respective Component Mode.
An easy way to tell that you’re in Component Mode is via the blue cage highlight.
You can return to Object Mode by selecting it from the same marking menu.
You can also switch between Object Type and Component Type
via the selection mode menu in the Status Line.
The adjacent selection mask tools allow you to determine what you can and can’t select.
These change depending on the selection mode you’ve chosen.
For more information about polygonal modeling, see our tutorial about
“Modeling a head with proper topology”.
The last selection menu button allows you to select objects by hierarchy.
In Root mode, clicking any part of the rocket selects the entire rocket.
While in Leaf mode, only the specific portion of the rocket clicked is selected.
Now that you know how to select objects or components,
you can start interacting with the scene through the tools in the Tool Box.
The most common forms of interaction are Translation, Rotation, and Scale.
Each of these tools displays a unique manipulator handle,
which you can interact with your mouse to manipulate the object.
Dragging the center gives you free control over manipulation in all three axes.
As you can see, by dragging the center of the Scale manipulator we can scale the rocket evenly
in all three axes,
or by dragging the middle of the Rotate manipulator we can rotate freely
in every direction at once.
However, this degree of freedom can sometimes make the results
of your manipulation unpredictable.
For example, while trying to move this rocket straight up off the launch pad,
we’ve inadvertently moved it to the side as well.
We can constrain movement to a single axis by dragging one of the manipulator handles.
These handles are always color coded the same way.
Red refers to the X-axis, green the Y-axis, and blue the Z-axis.
We can constrain the movement to two of these axes, known as an axis plane,
by holding Ctrl and clicking the opposite manipulator handle.
For example, to move the rocket in the XZ plane, hold Ctrl and click the Y manipulator handle.
If we dolly in close, notice the center of the handle shows the updated constrained axis plane.
Now if we drag the center of the manipulator, the rocket only moves in the XZ plane.
We can Ctrl + click the center of the manipulator to switch back to the view plane.
You can open the Tool Settings Editor either by double-clicking the tool’s icon
or by clicking the Tool Settings Editor icon.
This editor shows you additional options relative to each tool.
If manipulators are too imprecise, you can edit an object’s attribute values via the Channel Box.
The Channel Box is the fastest, most streamlined way to set specific attribute values,
such as translation or rotation, for objects in your scene.
However, it’s a very barebones interface that lacks interactive controls for more nuanced tweaking.
You can find these types of controls in the Attribute Editor,
which provides a more visual representation of an object’s attributes,
via widgets like sliders and checkboxes.
When you have both editors open at the same time,
you can switch back and forth via the tabs that appear on the side,
or via the Ctrl + A shortcut.
If you click around the scene you’ll notice there are a few objects you can’t select.
This is because they’re on a locked layer.
Layers contain objects in your scene,
but are different from the hierarchical groupings we looked at in the Outliner earlier.
Their main purpose is to allow you to hide or lock sets of objects.
You view all the layers in a scene via the Layer Editor below the Channel Box.
By clicking the leftmost box on a layer, you can toggle the layer’s visibility,
which also applies to all objects it contains.
Beside this you’ll find the layer’s Display Type.
R stands for Reference Type, in which you can see the geometry but not interact with it.
This type is ideal when you want to see elements of a layer without accidentally selecting them.
Next is the Template Type.
Like Reference type, this locks the layer but shows you the elements as wireframe.
This is ideal if you need to align components in another layer to those of the template layer,
such as the desert background to this launch pad.
When the box is empty, the layer is in Normal Type.
You can add and remove selected objects to specific layers
by right-clicking that layer and selecting the appropriate option.
You should now be comfortable interacting with objects in your scene.
To learn more about these tools and editors beyond the scope of this movie,
see the other tutorials in the Maya Learning Channel (MayaHowTos),
in the Maya documentation included with the software,
or online at the Autodesk website.