Welcome to this first lesson in Mile, where we're going to cover the interface, it's the first thing
you see when you open mine.
So it's good to get familiarized with it.
And as you go through this course, you will become more and more familiar with it and comfortable using
it.
But it's a great place to start just so that we know what we're looking at, because it's easy to get
intimidated when you're first starting to learn 3D.
I know I was when I opened up a program and you see all of these buttons and all of these menus and
you have no idea what's important and what's not.
And it just looks like some crazy alien interface.
And where do you even begin with that?
So that's why I have this lesson.
You can refer back to it, but it's also just kind of to ease your fears, right?
Like you're not going to need to learn every single little button and menu option here to be successful
and Miah and use it.
I'm going to show you the things that we use the most.
And in this interface, I'm going to show you kind of how to visually categorize these things so you
can kind of know, OK, I'm probably not going to use this.
So visually, I don't need to worry about kind of that chaos of all these buttons up here.
So let's just kind of take an overall look at this.
Normally, when you open up, Maya, you're going to get some type of a view like this.
And you can see down here that it says RSP and that tells us the camera view that we're viewing in the
viewport.
And that's what this middle section is here.
This is called the viewport.
And you can see the axes down here on the lower left.
So you can see why is up and Z is kind of to the left.
And so this is where we're going to see everything that's happening in our scene.
And down here, we have a timeline for when we start animating.
We can scrub this, we can play it over here.
We can set it to loop back several times by clicking that.
We can turn on auto key, turn that off, change the frame range, all these things.
But typically when I'm using this, I use it just like this.
I scrub, I look, and then I can change frame range clicking and dragging that or typing in numbers
here.
And these two numbers actually just mean the kind of in and out points of what we're looking at versus
the whole scene.
Right.
So you can see we can kind of adjust this and slide this around, but it doesn't change the first number.
And that's why that's kind of the absolute values of the in and out of the scene.
But we can temporarily change that kind of scale so we can see, you know, a smaller scale of the timeline.
So it's easier to scrub a smaller section if it's a very big shot or something like that.
And if you double click it, it will jump out to the whole thing and maximize to the entire length of
the frame range that you've said.
So that's the bottom part.
And you can see down here in the bottom left, this will be very helpful as you're starting this whole
display, short help, tips and tools and selections.
So if I'm going up here and I don't know what this is and I hover over it, I'll get a tool tip that
will pop up.
But if you're looking in the lower left as well, it'll say the same thing.
So if you're a little impatient for the tooltip to pop up, you can just look in the lower left and
you can see as I scrub my mouse through, I'm not clicking anything.
I'm just hovering over.
Everything you can see is showing me what each one of these tools is named and what they do.
And if you leave it over there, you know, the tool tip will also pop up.
So that's one quick way to figure out what all these little things do up here.
Don't worry about what each one of them does yet.
We'll get into that later.
But just know, you know, these are different tabs for different kind of sections.
And these sections are also kind of related to these different dropdown menus here.
Maya tries to organize the menus into different disciplines so you can see modeling, rigging, animation.
It's all separate into their own menu sets because typically, if you're doing one, you're not really
going to be doing the other.
And in a production, normally, this is kind of the linear workflow of how things are made anyways.
First model something, then you riggert the animated, for example, you can't really animate something
that doesn't exist, so you have to model it first.
And if you're going to regret that, you need to rig it before animation.
So it's just kind of they try to do it in a way, an order that makes sense for how you're going to
create things and animate things and render things.
That's why these are ordered the way they are.
And you can see that they change the menu options up here, but only after windows.
You can see watch windows.
And as I change the options, Windows stays the same.
So everything from file to windows is never going to change and everything after that will and a lot
of these things.
So I'm in the animation tab here and the drop down menu and I'm on the animation shelf here.
And you can see there's a play blast.
There's different kind of options.
And a lot of those things are also here.
So you can see play blast.
Is here as well.
It's the same icon, it's the same tooltip, so even though there's all these different buttons, they
actually just put them in more than one place.
So it makes it look more complicated than it is because the same option is put in several different
places.
So, for example, with play blast, I could actually even.
Right.
Click on the timeline down here and it's off the screen.
But if you do this on your and your Miah, you can go down to the bottom and you can see an option for
play blast again.
So Play Blast, for example, is in three different places.
So, you know, this is also another reason why not to get overwhelmed by all these options, because
visually, it looks like there's a ton of them.
But really, they're just the same ones over and over in different ways, you know, depending on how
you want to work or select options or menus or how you want to select tools, then they try to give
you as many options as you want to, really, which is a little too much.
Typically, you're only ever going to, you know, use this up here or the shelf.
It's whatever you're comfortable with.
I find it kind of hard to remember what each one of these icons are and then to wait for the, you know,
tooltip to pop up.
Typically what I'm going through the menu up here and I'm not using this as much, but it's definitely
nice to have sometimes on a couple of different things, like, you know, in this course I'm probably
going to make, you know, a couple of sphere's just to show you how things work.
We'll get into manipulating things in the next lesson.
But, you know, besides that, I don't really use the shelf options all that much.
So now that we have this kind of shelf option and some of these menu things covered, let's look at
what's in between them.
We kind of see this, you know, drop down menu that we talked about.
Then there's all these buttons up here and they all do different types of things that we're going to
get into a lot later.
So for right now, just know that you don't really have to worry about any of these things and we'll
slowly cover these later.
These aren't super, super important and getting started.
So we're just going to skip them now for the interface.
Don't worry about these.
So the next kind of thing we want to look at are these different windows as well.
So we have, you know, a blank window here.
We have blank window here.
They have their own little tabs here.
And then there's these tabs on the side.
So, again, it seems like there's a ton of options, but it's really not.
So, for example, with this tab, this can actually be, you know, closed down by clicking it or double
clicking it to open it back up.
But if you noticed here, this little button gets highlighted and again highlighted as we're clicking
it.
So it's the same thing like we were talking about earlier, the play blast.
It's just a different way to select kind of menu options here.
So you can do it from up here or you can do it from this tab.
So you can see the modelling tool kit.
We can go back to the attributes or we could select over here.
So why this is significant is because if I create a sphere, this is going to tell me the name.
It's going to tell me where it is and space.
Is it on as a visible and the history of the object and any inputs there are.
So I can see what the inputs are.
So this is kind of a quick way to see what's the status of this object where it is if I go to the attribute
Ed?
I can kind of see this information displayed a little bit differently so I can see translate as all
zero if we go back to the channel box, we can see that's shown here as well.
Just the same thing shown twice like we're talking about earlier.
I want to help simplify this stuff in your mind so you don't feel like that.
You know, this is something different than this.
It's not.
It's the same thing.
It's just in a different place.
So just to kind of emphasize this again, I wanted to show you something that I use quite a bit.
If you hold down spacebar, you will get the hotbox many what Maya calls the hotbox menu.
And I'm holding down Space Bar and I have all of the menu options available to me.
You might be able to tell that is ordered the same exact way that the tabs over here ordered.
So modeling, you can see mesh mesh, edit mesh, edit mesh mesh tools, mesh tools and so on and so
on.
You can see rigging, animation effects and rendering.
That's the exact same way this is laid out over here.
So it's just a quicker way to get to all of these menus is by holding down Space Bar and I use that
quite a bit.
It took me a couple of years to get used to it and actually use it because I think it does take a little
familiarity with Maya to feel comfortable with this.
But the sooner I use this, the quicker you'll be in Maya.
And I would highly encourage you to use this instead of having to hunt around for stuff up here and
changing menus.
You can get to everything right here by holding down space bar.
So that's a pretty useful tip that I think will be useful even more later.
Now that we know what the channel boxes and the difference with the attribute editor, let's jump over
to this section.
We can see the viewport has its own options.
And if you hover over each one of these objects, you'll also get the tooltip.
And so I won't go over each one of these because to be honest, they're not very helpful as a beginner
starting out, these aren't really that important.
But I did want to talk about the different views and Maya.
So if I don't hold on space, want to just tap it.
You can see I get multiple views.
And typically what you'll see, just click this over here is something like this when you're just starting
out, Maya.
So if I had spacebar again with my mouse just hovering over a different window, I'm not clicking anything
with my mouse.
I can jump into those views and you can see what the views are by the camera name, top Y, front Z,
side X perspective.
And so we can jump between different perspective views.
If we need to see something top down and modeling, we can do that.
So that's one quick way to divide up the screen as well.
So if we want to divide the screen in a different way, we can go to panels, layouts and we can say
two pane side by side.
And that's what I had earlier that you saw, because this is the way I like to animate sometimes so
I can get back to the perspective.
You just by hitting space bar and these kind of buttons over here just kind of like shortcuts to these
different modes as well.
Instead of hitting spacebar, you can kind of jump through.
And one of the last things I want to talk about is the outliner and outliner.
You're going to have open and spend a lot of time.
And because it's basically a table of contents of what's in your scene, you can see that we have these
different cameras that we saw earlier when we were in the kind of four view setup.
And they're all great because they're hidden.
We can actually see them in the interface so we can see the the previous one.
And that's one way that we can select this object or we can select it just by clicking it left.
Mouse clicking So that's kind of two ways.
This like things you either through the outliner or through the viewport.
So that is a quick rundown on the interface.
I hope it got you a little more familiarized with what you're looking at when you open up Miah.
It's not as intimidating as it seems.
And if you follow along with this course, you will just pick up these things.
And so that I won't have to walk through each little button kind of in a dry way, we'll take a project
based approach so that you'll get more familiar with the interface as we go along.
So thanks for watching.
And I'll see in the next lesson where we will briefly cover manipulators and how to move stuff around.
And Maya, thanks for watching.