Maya's U.I.

Before I begin my first tutorial via Maya, I thought I would take you through a brief walk through on some of the features of the U.I. (User Interface). 

Say hello to your new best friend! So, I'm not exactly sure on how to take you through this tour, I'm still getting to grips with the program after a few basic tutorials but I think that if I use red circles in some pictures it might help us explain the various features of the U.I. 

What you can see circled in this picture is known as "The Shelf". The shelf is the back done of Maya as it contains all the useful tools needed to use the program such as placing polygons and sculpting.  The real power of shelves, however, is that you can create custom shelves, and then make tools or command shortcuts that are quickly accessed from there with a single click. You can see I have the "Polygons" section opened which I will now use to place a basic sphere. 

See? It's that easy. The shelf is the backbone of Maya and will most likely be used the most if your new to the program. 

The next section is circled are called "The Quick Layout Buttons". The Quick Layout Buttons let you switch between useful panel layouts in a single click. This comes in handy if you want a more technical view of the object you are rendering such as a view from the sides, front, bottom and top. Another helpful to access a quick view of one of the buttons is to press the space bar, doing so will grant you a view like this,

Pressing the space bar again will reset the view back to normal. The Quick Layout Button's are another essential part of Maya. They allow the user to see if an object is asymmetrical in appearance and also allow them to fine tune there objects more accurately in terms of detail. Now I would like to talk about camera controls for a bit. When I first started Maya I struggled to get to grips with the programs camera, it just wouldn't work how I wanted it. But, after a view tutorials on the Internet I learned that its as easy as holding ALT on your keyboard. When alt is held and the left mouse button is clicked, it allows you to rotate the camera. With alt is held and the right mouse clicked, it lets you zoom the camera in and out on your object. When alt is held and the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) is clicked it allows the camera to be moved side to side and up and down on a plane. For now this will conclude a brief intro the programs U.I. The reason why I haven't went into detail on other parts of the U.I is because I haven't started using them yet. Once I use them I will cover there function and feature on any more tutorial posts. I would also give advice on practising your camera work as it can be a bit funky to control at first glance.For my next blog post I will cover how to make a basic lemon in Maya. It may not seem like an exciting project at first but I will eventually show you how to apply an animation to the lemon making it look like it cuts in half.