Learning Autodesk® Maya® 2013

Maya's user interface centers on the large view panel where you build and manipulate your scene.

You need a three-button mouse to navigate the interface, to change your view, and to manage objects.

Here we explain the hierarchy that governs objects and their attributes.

The most common windows in Maya include the Attribute Editor, Outliner, Hypershade, Hypergraph, Graph Editor, and the Layer Editor; let's study each.

You'll want to customize Maya -- just a little at first (keeping Maya at the default will help you learn the program) and more are you gain experience with it.

No matter how you model, you'll be creating and editing vertices, edges, and faces.

We'll look at the primitive objects that can be created via polygons in Maya.

Your tools settings affect every action you take, so know how to reveal and change them to suit your work.

Here you'll see how to divide a surface further to work with it in various ways.

Sometimes the best way to create geometry is to extend an object you've already created, using Extrude, Bridge, or Bevel.

And sometimes the most efficient means of creating more geometry is to duplicate something already existing; check out the Edit > Duplicate Special menu.

Subdivision surfaces (Subdivs) don't come with option-box menu options; you have to drop the object into your scene and then modify it.

You can improve on the native, built-in geometry options; for example, you can use regular polygons to create subdivision surfaces.

Here's how to create some more creased edges on your subdiv geometry.

Let's look at how subdivision surfaces operate at rendering time, with Maya's native renderer.

Next, compare rendering subdivision surfaces with the mental ray renderer.

Here you'll begin to understand the difference between polygonal objects and NURBS objects.

NURBS primitives have a set of controls like other objects, but because they deal with curved surfaces instead of polygonal ones, you'll encounter some new settings.

We'll look at the tools to model NURBS and how this contrasts with modelling polygons.

Let's try creating more complex NURBS objects.

We introduce basic shading, also known as texturing: applying a material to your model for lighting and rendering.

The basic shading workflow in Maya begins with the default and common shaders, such as the lambert, phong, and blinn.

We continue with more advanced shaders, such as anisotropic, ramp, and surface shaders.

Texture nodes feed into materials. They can be procedural, where you change the texture within Maya without having to go out to an image editor.

Shading networks, in the Hypershade, define how multiple textures and attributes apply to a shader and relate to or interact with each other.

A substance texture (created in the Hypershade or simply by clicking the Map button) is a procedural texture that allows you to use many cool presets.

Let's introduce the wonderful, but perhaps laborious, world of UV mapping, projecting flat images onto 3D geometry.

We continue with how to modify and apply a UV texture.

A popular lighting setup is "three-point lighting". Here's how to establish that setup in Maya.

Maya has many types of lights, found under the Create > Lights menu. Here's a walk through them.

You can manipulate and even animate lights.

In this lesson you'll see how to render shadows for Maya lights.

You can have different lights affect different objects in your scene.

Lighting effects include glow, lens flare, and volumetric lighting.

As we move into rendering, we'll start by examining what a camera is and where it gets placed, by default and by the user.

Let's see how to output your renders and cameras.

Play with your render quality settings, and you'll see that you can very quickly use up a LOT of time and memory making and saving renders.

Creating an IPR (interactive photoreal rendering) lets you see your render adjust on the fly as you change, for example, lighting.

Enable raytracing to get true reflections, refractions, and shadows in your scene.

The Render Stats rolldown provides viewing and rendering options for specific objects.

Render layers are very powerful, allowing you to render objects in separate passes for use in later compositing.

Render layers are very powerful, allowing you to render objects in separate passes for use in later compositing.

To demonstrate compositing several render layers, we'll use Adobe After Effects.

The basic tool for adding motion to a scene -- animating -- is the keyframe.

Here's how to fix an object's attributes at a point in time by creating a keyframe.

Use the Graph Editor to create more complex animations than keyframes alone can produce, and to clean up rough animations.

Here's how to create and use a basic rig to control your object model.

The Set Driven Key command can make it easier to position, maneuver, and limit your rig.

Let's see how the Connection Editor will provide a control item, making selection easier.

We continue to build controls for our claw rig, this time using the Expression Editor to control and resolve multiple movements of the same object.

Joints and skinning allow us to deform smooth, continuous geometry as we animate.

See the difference between rendering with Maya's native renderer and with mental ray: mental ray provides more options.

Regular Maya lights and shaders work fine in mental ray, but check out the additional options available to you with mental ray's settings.

Let's examine two mental ray shaders to see how this renderer handles them.

The mental ray physical sun and sky system are controlled from some new nodes in the Outliner and Render Settings.