Learning Autodesk Maya 2014 - A Practical Hands On Course

Explore the Maya interface, including the main menus, status line, channel box, and toolbox. Learn to switch menu sets and access tools for polygons, objects, and rendering.

Master Maya camera navigation by switching between perspective and front/top/side views with the spacebar, and by orbiting, panning, and zooming with alt plus mouse.

Explore Maya viewport display with film gate, camera view, and grid options. Tailor grid, view, and heads up display details like poly count and frame rate through display preferences.

Hold spacebar to summon the hot box at your cursor, access polygon primitives, and use the five marking menus—top, right, bottom, left, center—to switch views and move, rotate, scale.

Learn to customize Maya’s interface by resizing and docking windows, creating shelves, mapping hotkeys, adjusting colors, and building marking menus to access tools like delete history and freeze transforms.

Set up and manage Maya projects to organize assets and textures within a project directory, ensuring textures load via relative paths in scenes and avoiding absolute paths.

Explore the file path editor to locate and remap external textures, re-link them to geometry, and auto resolve paths for reliable texture management.

Explore primitive objects in Maya, including Nurbs and polygon primitives, using interactive creation and channel box options to shape, place, and edit spheres with four‑sided Nurbs surfaces and flexible polygons.

Master transforming objects in Maya by using the move, rotate, and scale manipulators, adjust world coordinates and pivot point using the channel box and center pivot.

Learn parenting and grouping in Maya to organize scenes and drive transforms. Create parent-child hierarchies with spheres and cubes, use group nodes, and master quick hotkeys for efficient scene management.

Learn how freezing and resetting transformations standardizes coordinates, converts worldspace to local, and aligns manipulators by zeroing translate, rotate, and scale values with snapping and parenting practices.

Explore Maya's hypergraph to view and manage all scene nodes, from transform and shape nodes to cameras, with input-output connections and multiple layouts.

Master the outliner to view the scene's node hierarchy, select and rename objects, and manage parent-child relationships. Split the panel, isolate sections, pan, and dock the outliner for efficient workflow.

Create and manage image planes in Maya to reference photographs or textures, attaching to a camera or using free image planes, with width, height, aspect ratio, and opacity controls.

Explore Maya curves for geometry creation, hair simulation, lofted surfaces, and curve tools such as CV curve tool, EP curve tool, pencil curve tool, bezier curves, and arc options.

Explore modifying curve components in Maya 2014 by manipulating control vertices and edit points, understanding open-end endpoints, using selection masks and hulls, and toggling between object and component modes.

build curves in Autodesk Maya 2014 using the CV curve tool, attach and detach curves, adjust direction with reverse options, choose connect or blend, insert knots, and manage history.

Explore creating polygons with primitives and the create polygon tool to form n sided shapes, then edit vertices, edges, and faces using the marking menu.

Master Maya polygon component selection with marking menus and face/edge/vertex selections. Convert selections, use border edge and shortest path tools, and apply current and next constraints for triangles and quads.

Explore creating basic structures in Maya by turning a primitive cube into a building, adjusting pivot and grid snapping. Add windows and doors with extrude and insert edge loop.

Explore the modeling toolkit in Maya 2014, enabling multi component selection of vertices, edges, and faces, with marquee tools, constraints, and mesh editing features, plus customizing with a shelf.

Learn to extrude faces in Autodesk Maya using mesh extrude and the universal manipulator, adjusting subdivisions, thickness, and worldspace versus local space to shape the neck, beak, leg, and toes.

Learn edge loops in Maya by inserting loops and using edge flow to shape a wing on a half-model crow, then extrude, mirror the geometry, and soften normals.

Mirror the geometry across the negative x axis, merging with the original to create a seamless surface, after cleaning the model by deleting history and freezing transforms.

Explore how normals determine lighting in Maya, including face and vertex normals, editing flips, and shaping shading with soft or hard edges, backface culling, and two-sided lighting.

Learn to use the sculpt geometry tool in Maya 2014 to push, pull, smooth, relax, pinch, slide, and erase geometry with brush controls, opacity, and masking on selected components.

Use the bridge tool to connect open edges on the same surface, creating a fence-like bridge. Duplicate with negative scale to invert holes and set 48 divisions for a twist.

Use the bridge tool on opposing faces, applying linear and blend paths with twist and taper via the graph with keys to shape arches, then refine geometry.

Learn to extrude along a curve in Maya 2014 by aligning a polygon face to a curve, adjusting divisions, and applying twist and taper.

Master Maya 2014's mirror cut tool to split and mirror geometry, merge vertices, and clean up history and freeze transforms for a clean, reusable fence model.

Master beveling in Maya by beveling post tops and extruded edges, adding divisions with the modeling toolkit and multi-cut, and refining with offset, segments, and roundness for a rounded finish.

Learn how to project a curve onto a shield-shaped polygon model, split the mesh with the projected curve, and extrude the resulting pattern to create a raised decal.

Explore Maya 2014 polygon reduction tools to lower poly count while preserving edge flow. Compare original and reduced models with poly count display and paint reduce weights.

Learn symmetry modelling in Maya: enable symmetry across your geometry, edit one side, and have changes update on the other, with tools like extrude and multi-cut.

Use the quad draw tool to create and refine geometry on existing surfaces, guided by transform constraints, shifting between grid and surface, and adding faces and edge loops with shift-click.

Learn a nurbs overview, including four-sided surfaces, curve-based construction, and using control vertices to shape smooth surfaces for the final render.

Create a cubic CV curve to outline the lamp post profile. Revolve the curve with the re-evolve tool to form a NURBS surface, then refine the base and vertices.

Project a curve onto a lamp post, then extrude a circular profile along that curve to form an arm, adjusting the seam and tapering with scale to fit the pole.

Use the Maya trim tool to cut letters from a planar NURBS surface by projecting text onto the surface and trimming away interior areas.

Apply the bevel plus tool to extrude curves into a chiseled bevel on letters, using order-dependent curves, straight in direction, and NURBS output for a clean plaque.

Convert NURBS to polygons in Maya 2014, producing quad-based geometry with tessellated options, adjusting polygon count and ISO parm settings for a clean, efficient model.

Explore lofting in Maya by building a bag shape with a C-v curve tool, blending and closing curves, duplicating and arranging curves, and constructing a NURBS surface with uniform spans.

Explore how materials and shaders define surface appearance and light interaction in Maya, switch among Lambert, Blinn, Anisotropic, and Phong, and adjust color, transparency, reflectivity, textures, and viewport 2.0 previews.

Learn how to map UVs in Maya by projecting UVs into 0–1 texture space, organizing shells, and using the UV texture editor to unfold and relax them for painting.

Apply cylindrical and planar UV mapping in Maya to project leg and toe textures, adjust the projection manipulators, unfold shells, and sew edges for correct proportions.

Learn UV mapping in Maya 2014 using the UV texture editor to project Krogh’s foot, leg, head, tail, and body with cylindrical, planar, and automatic mapping, then unfold.

Explains mirroring geometry with the mirror cut tool and laying out UV shells using the UV texture editor to fit non-overlapping UV in the 0 to 1 texture space.

Create and export a 2D UV texture template in Maya, paint a custom crow texture in Photoshop, and apply it with a Lambert anisotropic material for feather highlights.

Explore Maya rendering options, including Maya software, Mental Ray, and hardware renderers, to create 2d images from textures and lighting, with Viewport 2.0 delivering real-time feedback and ambient occlusion.

Learn to use hypershade in Maya to create and connect shader nodes, textures, and utilities, explore materials, and graph input-output connections to manage scene surfaces.

Explore substance textures in Maya, procedural textures that start from a base image and are modified with sliders, saving time and exporting maps to disk.

Explore the uber shader in Maya 2014 to interactively work with complex shading networks, applying it to an eyeball with diffuse, specular, normal, and displacement maps.

Learn to create and manage a joint skeleton in Maya, building a joint chain with root and bones, mastering parenting, rotation, scaling, and orthographic placement for clean, planar animation.

Create a clean, animation-ready skeleton by placing and aligning torso, head, leg, and tail joints in side and front views. Parent joints, place toes, and prepare mirroring to enable animation.

Align joint orientation and freeze transforms to reset joints to world coordinates, set primary and secondary axes along the bone, ensuring joints rotate with the bone.

Bind geometry to the skeleton with interactive and smooth skin binds, adjust 0–1 joint weights, and compare dual quaternion versus classic linear while normalizing weights and setting max influences.

Master weight normalization in Maya 2014, keeping bound geometry weights 0-1, using the component editor to view per-vertex and per-joint weights with post normalization.

Learn to paint skin weights in Maya with the smooth skin paint tool, adjusting values, using color ramps, eyedropper sampling, and smoothing for balanced joint influence.

Relocate joints using the move skinned joints tool in templated mode, then smooth and copy vertex weights with the weight hammer and copy/paste vertex weights to improve deformation.

Learn to mirror character weights in Maya using the Mirror Skin Weights tool on the YZ plane, adjusting closest joint influence to accurately copy left-side weights to the right.

Learn to create and manipulate ik handles in Maya, using forward and inverse kinematics to control joint chains, end effectors, and character limbs with single chain and rotate plane solvers.

Create control handles to simplify selection and drive ik handles, use maintain offset with point and orient constraints, and freeze transforms for consistent, zero-start animation.

Learn basic rigging in Autodesk Maya 2014 by adding control handles for simple animation. Organize with layers and apply constraints—point, orient, and parent—to build a head and body rig.

Open the node editor, add nodes, and connect input and output ports to drive wing rotation from the left wing to other joints for automated rigging.

Learn keyframes as the foundation of animation by animating a sphere with translate y, using key selected and autokey, and adjusting playback range for looping and oscillating motion.

Learn to animate a fully rigged character in Maya by creating autokey translate and rotate keyframes, choreographing a takeoff with wing motion using the noad editor and frame copying.

Master the dope sheet to edit keyframes and retime animations in Maya, using selection, marquee to group and move keys, and scaling to match the frame rate.

Explore Maya's graph editor to view and edit animation curves, keyframes, and tangents, and learn to select, move, scale, and adjust timing for precise motion.

Refine a Krogh animation in the graph editor by adjusting wing flap timing and moving keyframes across frames. Extend and smooth the X, Y, Z translations for a consistent takeoff.

Adjust the graph editor timing to keep the crow’s feet planted and refine the takeoff. Use the retiming tool with markers to non-destructively stretch timing and slow the wing flap.

Learn to use Maya 2014's grease pencil to draw directly on the screen, set keyframes, sketch frames, choose brushes, erase, and preview ghosting while planning animation.

Learn how to perform batch rendering in Maya, configuring render settings, choosing Mental Ray, outputting multiple frames as individual tiff images, and using auto threads with progress feedback.

Explore how final gather adds indirect lighting and color bleed in Maya, simulating global illumination by letting light bounce between surfaces, with quality tuned by point density and accuracy.

Explore the physical sun and sky network in Maya to simulate daylight with a directional light linked to a physical sky shader, enabling final gather and controlling shadow softness.

Explore rendering quality controls in Maya 2014, using a unified sampling slider to adjust overall quality, anti aliasing, and sampling ranges, with progressive mode for interactive previews.