[Music]
hi there and welcome to Maya so if you
just installed your shiny new software
and fired her up only to find that
you're not quite sure what to do next
well even though the interface may look
intimidating at first it's really not so
bad once you understand how each section
of the UI breaks down in general there
are three main areas at the top you'll
find menus and buttons for Maya's many
tools and commands in the middle you'll
find the viewport which displays the
objects in your scene as well as tools
and panels specifically designed to
modify those objects and at the bottom
you'll find animation and scripting
controls let's start back up here with
the menu bar which is probably easy
enough to understand if you've used
almost any other software before in here
you'll find almost all of Maya's tools
and commands neatly arranged from
general stuff like opening and saving
files to undoing or redoing edits to
more specific task based commands
something a little more unique to Maya
is that you can change the task based
menus that appear here at via this
drop-down box each of these menu sets is
designed to cater to the specific needs
of each of these workflows so you want
to set this based on what you plan on
doing next
additionally shortcuts to many of the
most useful commands can be found here
in the Shelf represented by these
colorful icons so for example clicking
the basic cube icon here creates a cube
in my scene exactly as choosing create
polygon primitives cube would have like
menu sets shelves are also organized by
discipline except there are even more
specific for example curved surfaces
poly modeling and sculpting can all be
considered modeling tasks however
shelves don't change automatically with
your menu sets making it possible to use
an FX menu set with a modeling shelf
like you see here if you're unsure what
an icon means you can hover over it and
check down here in the help line or just
wait for the tooltip to appear right on
the mouse cursor both the helpline and
tooltips are extremely useful so I
recommend keeping an eye on them at
least until you're a comfortable
with all of Maya's bells and whistles
finally there's the status line nestled
right in between the menus and shelves
this line mostly tells you the on/off
state of various modes like object
versus component mode snapping mirroring
and so on though it does also contain
shortcuts to some basic file and
rendering commands two of these though I
recommend paying special attention to
object in component modes aka green
selection mode and blue selection mode
object mode is for selecting an entire
object at once long component mode is
for selecting smaller sub parts of that
object this will be important later when
we start playing around with position
and shape the last thing I'll say here
is that you can use FH as swap between
the two as well moving on the entire
middle section of the UI is dedicated to
viewing and interacting with objects in
the viewport to navigate the viewport
hold the Alt key while dragging any of
the mouse buttons you can also press f
to automatically frame a selected object
or a to frame everything in the scene
regardless of selection the panel
toolbar and menu give access to all
kinds of view options like wireframe vs.
shaded views lights shadows smoothing
and other viewport specific quality
settings you can also hold the right
mouse button over objects to bring up
the marking menu which contains
shortcuts to all sorts of things you can
do to that objective holding shift or
control as well will also bring up
different versions of this menu left of
the viewport you'll find the tool box
which contains tools for selecting or
transforming objects so if I select the
cube then I can activate the move tool
to move it around the rotate tool to
rotate it or the scale tool to scale
the last slot here will change depending
on my most recently used tool so for
example if I activate the multi cut tool
to add an edge to my cube then switch
back to the move tool you'll see I can
quickly get back to the multi cut tool
here and you can also double click any
of these toolbox icons to bring up their
tool settings just to reiterate an
earlier point using many of these tools
in object mode versus component mode
makes a big difference in component or
blue mode I can select and move
individual vertices which changes the
cubes shape whereas an object or green
mode I move the entire object at once
knowing when to use which is an
important skill you'll develop over time
these four buttons underneath the
toolbox are my panel layouts they
determine how my viewport is split up
choices include the default perspective
camera a simultaneous for view of front
topside and perspective cameras a
similar to view version and finally the
outliner which shows me a list of all
the objects in my scene additionally you
can use spacebar to quickly enlarge
views or return to the previous one to
the right of the viewport our various
editors the channel box in attribute
editor contain the various attributes
associated with a selected object like
its exact position number of
subdivisions and so on both of them are
broken into sections like these tabs in
the attribute editor or these headings
in the channel box it's important to
note that both these editors show the
same attributes just in different forms
so use the one that's most comfortable
for you in general the attribute editor
is the more user-friendly of the two
with plenty of sliders and widgets for
editing values
meanwhile the channel box lets you see
and edit animatable attributes more
quickly if you accidentally close one or
both of them you can always find them up
here in the top right there are also
other editors here like the tool
settings editor which I showed earlier
or the modeling toolkit which contains a
wealth of useful modeling tools lastly
there's the character controls which are
specifically for creating animatable
skeletons you probably won't want to
fool around with this one until you're
more comfortable in Maya finally this
brings us to the two strips at the
bottom the first to deal entirely with
animation like the time slider and
playback controls which are likely
familiar to anyone who's used a video
player before from here you can play
stop rewind and manually scrub through
time it's important to note that Maya
measures time in frames though not
seconds the default frame rate equates
24 frames with one second of playback so
these 120 frames actually represent only
five real-time seconds of footage you
can change the frame rate via the drop
down here and it's generally a good idea
to settle on one before you begin your
project once you have you can change the
total number of frames in the scene as
well as the range represented by the
time slider
other stuff you can change here includes
looping performance enhanced caching
Auto recording animation keyframes and
more via the pop-up Preferences window
there is also some animation and
character layer stuff but that's a bit
more advanced finally at the very bottom
is the command line where you can issue
direct commands to Maya these are the
same commands that all of my other
buttons in widgets use - so for example
if I move this object over and then
enter the polycube command then Maya
creates a queue just like I made earlier
when I click the cube button Maya also
supports Python commands at the flick of
a switch and has a full-fledged script
editor for more complex scripts and
that's the MIUI in a nutshell the only
other thing to note is that all these UI
components are modular they can be
undocked and moved around just by
dragging these dotted areas you can then
redock them wherever these blue lines
appear
one way Maya makes use of this is via
these different workspaces in the top
right just like the menu sets I showed
you at the beginning of the video
each of these workspaces rearranges the
UI based on their respective tasks
hiding things you don't need
while enlarging the things you do if you
ever need to reset one of these
workspaces to the default maybe because
you lost a panel accidentally or you've
got your UI into a weird customized
state you can do that from this drop
down to in general the default Maya
classic workspace is your one-stop shop
for everything and the one you'll see
most often in tutorials as well so
hopefully now you feel a bit more at
home in the my UI you can check the
description below
for other helpful UI topics in the Maya
help or if you're ready to move on I
suggest checking out the videos in our
intro to Maya course
you