This chapter takes you on a guided tour of all the elements visible on the Maya 2012 screen as you build a simple model of a decorative box. The chapter draws from the experience you had in Chapter 2, “Jumping in Headfirst, with Both Feet,” with the Solar System exercise. You'll visit the menus, icons, and shelves to become familiar with the interface basics as you build a model. For now, while you're first getting into this, knowing the name of everything and its purpose is a good idea. Don't get nervous; you won't need to retain a lot of information. Think of this more as a nickel tour.
This chapter also serves as a good reference when you're wondering about the purpose of a particular icon.
Topics in this chapter include:
The key to being a good digital artist or animator isn't knowing where to find all the tools and buttons but knowing how to find the features you need. Maya is intricate, with layers of function sets and interface options separated into categories. The purpose of this chapter is to help you get to know Maya and how it operates, building on your experience so far. This chapter will also answer the questions you may have about the UI from the previous chapter.
The best way to start is to explore the interface. Using your mouse, check out the menus and the tools. Just be careful not to change any settings; the rest of this book and its projects assume your Maya settings are all at their defaults. If you do change some settings inadvertently, reverting to the defaults is easy. Choose Window Settings/Preferences Preferences. In the Preferences window, choose Edit Restore Default Settings. Now all the settings and interface elements are restored to their default states.
Let's take another look at the initial Maya screen in Figure 3.1—this time with the Full Perspective window, and not the four-panel layout you saw in the previous chapter.
The Main Menu bar, Status line, and Shelf all run across the top of the screen. The Tool Box runs vertically on the left side of the screen. It contains icons for your Transform tools (such as Move and Rotate) as well as quick-view selections to allow you to customize your panel layouts quickly. The Attribute Editor and Channel Box/Layer Editor (the Channel Box is displayed in Figure 3.1, and not the Attribute Editor) run down the right side of the screen. Finally, listed from the top down, the Time slider, the Range slider, the Character Set menu, the Auto Keyframe button, and the Animation Preferences button, some of which you've already used, run across the bottom of the screen.
REMINDER: MAYA'S MOUSE CONTROLS
In Maya, holding the Alt key on a PC or the Option key on a Mac along with the appropriate button allows you to move in the view panel. The left mouse button (LMB) acts as the primary selection button (as it does in many other programs) and lets you orbit around objects when used with the Alt key. The right mouse button (RMB) activates numerous shortcut menus and lets you zoom with the Alt key. The middle mouse button (MMB) with the Alt key lets you move within the Maya interface, and the mouse's wheel can be used to zoom in and out as well.
In the Main Menu bar, shown in Figure 3.2, you'll find a few of the familiar menu choices you've come to expect in many applications, such as File, Edit, and Help.
In Maya, menu choices are context sensitive; they depend on what you're doing. By switching menu sets, you change your menu choices and hence your available toolset. The menu sets in Maya are Animation, Polygons, Surfaces, Dynamics, Rendering, and nDynamics. You select a menu set using the drop-down menu in the Status line below the Main Menu bar, as shown in Figure 3.3.
When you're wondering where a particular toolset is, all you need to do is ask yourself, “What CG phase would that function fall under?” Because the menu sets are organized in phases of computer animation workflow—modeling (Polygons and Surfaces), animating, dynamics, and lighting/rendering—the task dictates which menu includes its toolset.
No matter which menu set you're working in, the first six menu items are constant: File, Edit, Modify, Create, Display, and Window. The last menu, Help, is also constantly displayed no matter which menu set you choose.
Some plug-ins can also add menu items to the Main Menu bar. For example, Maya Muscle is a plug-in that comes with Maya and is on by default; it adds the Muscle menu to the Main Menu bar. If the plug-in is turned off, that menu item is removed. So, don't panic if you don't see the same exact Main Menu bar pictured throughout this book. Some of the primary menu headings are explained here:
File Deals with file operations, from saving and opening to optimizing scene size and export/import.
Edit Contains the commands you use to edit characteristics of the scene (for example, deleting and duplicating objects or undoing and redoing actions).
Modify Lets you edit the characteristics of objects in the scene, such as moving or scaling them or changing their pivot points.
Create Lets you make new objects, such as primitive geometries, curves, cameras, and so on.
Display Contains commands for adjusting elements of the graphical user interface (GUI) in Maya as well as objects in the scene, allowing you to toggle, or switch on or off, the display of certain elements as well as components of objects, such as vertices, hulls, pivots, and so on.
Window Gives you access to the many windows you'll come to rely on, such as the Attribute Editor, Outliner, Graph Editor, and Hypergraph. This menu is broken into submenus according to function, such as Rendering Editors and Animation Editors.
Help Gives you access to the help files.
You'll notice two different demarcations to the right of some menu items (Figure 3.4): arrows and boxes (called option boxes). Clicking an arrow opens a submenu that contains more specific commands. Clicking an option box () opens a dialog box in which you can set the options for that particular tool.
Menu sets are organized according to function. Each menu set gives you access to the commands associated with its broader function set. The Animation menu set, for example, displays in the Main Menu bar all the menu headers that correspond to animation functions, such as the Deform and Skeleton menus.
The Menu Set drop-down is the first thing on the Status line, as shown in Figure 3.5.
Changing between menus is easy if you use the default hotkeys shown in Table 3.1.
KEY | FUNCTION |
F2 | Animation menu set |
F3 | Polygons menu set |
F4 | Surfaces menu set |
F5 | Dynamics menu set |
F6 | Rendering menu set |
Switching back and forth between menu sets may feel a little strange at first, but it makes for a much more organized workspace than having all the menu headers staring at you across the top of the window.
You can access all the functions through the Hotbox anywhere on the screen. The Hotbox gives you convenient access to Maya's menus and commands inside the work panels.
To display the Hotbox, press and hold down the spacebar in any panel view. All the menu commands that are available from the Main Menu bar are also available through the Hotbox. To access a command, simply click it. You can display some or all of the menu headings to give you quick access to whatever commands and features you use most by clicking Hotbox Controls and selecting the menus.
Figure 3.6 shows the Hotbox configured to show all the menus in Maya 2012.
As you can see in Figure 3.6, the Hotbox is separated into five distinct zones—North, East, West, South, and Center—delineated by black diagonal lines. Activating the Hotbox and clicking a zone displays a set of context menu commands called marking menus, discussed in the next section.
If you don't see all the menu options when you invoke the Hotbox, or if you want to restrict the menu display to specific menu sets, simply invoke the Hotbox by pressing the spacebar, click Hotbox Controls, and mark the selection of menus you would like, such as Hide All or Show All, from the marking menu.
A WORD TO THE WISE ABOUT THE HOTBOX
You should use the Hotbox/marking menus only when you're comfortable with the interface and you've begun to establish a workflow for yourself. After you begin using them, however, you'll find them pleasantly efficient. Many animators prefer to turn off the menu bar to increase screen space for modeling and animating, and use the Hotbox exclusively. Others use both.
Again, use the Main Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of the Hotbox when you're learning. It's better to find out where the commands are first. It also helps cut down the clutter of commands and potential confusion about where and how to find them.
Marking menus are a fast UI workflow to allow you to select commands and options as you work in your panels without having access the Main Menu bar, much like the Hotbox. For example, right-clicking on any object in your scene gives you the marking menu shown in Figure 3.7. This particular marking menu allows you to select vertices on that object by moving your mouse to the vertex marking box as shown in Figure 3.8. Vertices and other object components are described in Chapter 4.
In addition to menu selections, the Hotbox has marking menus in each of the five zones. Using marking menus is yet another way to quickly access the commands you use the most. By default, the marking menus deal with changing your selection masks (which objects you can and can't select), Control Panel visibility, and the type of panel that is being displayed. You can also access predefined (but customizable) key/mouse strokes through the Hotbox.
In Maya, you can tear off menus to create separate floating boxes that you can place anywhere in the workspace, as shown here. This makes accessing menu commands easier, especially when you need to use the same command repeatedly. Let's say, for example, that you need to repeatedly access polygonal editing tools. You can tear off the Edit Mesh menu and place it at the edge of your screen. You can then click the commands you need as many times as necessary without opening the menu every time. To tear off a menu, click the dashed line at the top of the menu, and drag the menu where you want it.
The main focus of Maya is its work windows (called panels) —the perspective and orthographic views. You use these windows to create, manipulate, and view 3D objects, particles, and animations. By using the mouse, you can navigate in these views easily. Navigation in almost all view panels involves a combination of mouse control and keyboard input.
The default Maya layout begins with a full-screen perspective view, as shown in Figure 3.9. This is essentially a camera view and expresses real-world depth through the simulation of perspective. In this window, you can see your creation in three dimensions and move around it in real time to get a sense of proportion and depth.
SHORTCUTS TO VIEWING
Here's a summary of the most important keyboard shortcuts. Keep in mind that the Option key is used on a Macintosh in place of the Alt key on a PC. See Chapter 2 for more details.
Alt+MMB+click Tracks around a window.
Alt+RMB+click Dollies into or out of a view.
Scroll Wheel Dollies into or out of a view.
Alt +LMB+click Rotates or orbits the camera around in a Perspective window.
Alt+Ctrl+click and Drag Dollies your view into the screen area specified in your mouse drag.
ViewCube Allows you to change views in a panel easily.
Macintosh Keys The Option key on a Mac is used as the Alt key on a PC.
By pressing and releasing the spacebar, you can switch your view from the full-screen perspective to the four-panel layout shown in Figure 3.10. Pressing the spacebar again returns your active view panel to Full-Screen mode.
Orthographic views (top, front, and side) are most commonly used for modeling, because they're best at conveying exact dimensions and size relationships. Even though the cubes in the Perspective window are all the same size, the perspective view, by definition, displays the cubes farther away as being smaller than those closer to you. Orthographic views, however, display exact proportions so that you can see the four cubes as being identical in size and shape.
The four-panel layout gives you accurate feedback on the sizing and proportionality of your models. In general, you'll probably prefer to start your modeling in orthographic view and use the perspective view(s) for fine-tuning and finishing work and for setting up camera angles for rendering. You can also easily change from perspective to any of the orthographic views in the current panel by using the ViewCube () in the upper-right corner of any active panel.
When you're working in the windows, you can view your 3D objects as either wireframe models (as in Figure 3.11) or as solid, hardware-rendered models called Shaded mode (see Figure 3.12).
Try This In the four-panel layout (click the second Layout icon in the Tool Box), click Create Polygonal Primitives and make sure Interactive Creation is turned on. Then create a polygonal sphere by choosing Create Polygon Primitives Sphere. Your cursor turns into a small black cross, and “Drag on the grid” appears in the middle of your panels. Click and drag the cursor to create a sphere of any size, as shown in Figure 3.11. You'll notice its primary attributes in the Channel Box. Now press 5 on your keyboard (not the number pad) and you will see the sphere as a solid shaded ball. Press 4 to return to Wireframe mode.
Creating a primitive by clicking and dragging to specify its size and position only works when Interactive Creation is turned on. You'll find this option when you choose Create NURBS Primitives or Create. Polygon Primitives. When this option, at the bottom of each of those menus, is selected, you can click and drag the primitive you're creating. When it's unselected, the primitive appears at the origin in 3D space.
You can cycle through the levels of display detail by pressing 4, 5, 6, and 7. Wireframe mode is 4, Shaded mode is 5, Texture Shaded mode is 6, and Lighted mode is 7. Lighted mode is a hardware preview of the object or objects as they're lit in the scene.
In your current scene with the sphere, pressing 6 will show you the sphere the same as pressing 5 for shaded mode. That's because no textures have been added to the sphere. You will see textured mode in action soon. Pressing 7 in your sphere's scene will show you the ball as flat black. This is because there are no lights in the scene. We will cover this later in the book.
Texture Shaded mode (6) displays the image textures that have been applied to the object as long as Hardware Texturing is already enabled. (In the view panel, choose Shading Hardware Texturing, and make sure it's checked on.) Table 3.2 provides a summary.
KEY | FUNCTION |
4 | Toggles into Wireframe mode |
5 | Toggles into Shaded mode |
6 | Toggles into Textured mode |
7 | Toggles into Lighted mode |
It's always good to toggle between the Wireframe and Shaded modes to get a feel for the weight and proportion of your model as you're building it. The Texture mode is good for the rudimentary lining up of textures as well as for using reference images while modeling an object (covered next). The IPR renderer in Maya is also great for previewing work because it updates areas of the frame in good-quality renders at interactive speeds. Chapter 11, “Maya Rendering,” covers IPR.
The Lighted mode (Figure 3.13) is useful for spotting proper lighting direction and object highlights when you first begin lighting a scene. It helps to see the direction of lights in your scene without having to render frames all the time. How many lights you see in the Modeling window depends on your computer's graphics and overall capabilities. Chapter 10, “Maya Lighting,” covers lighting and makes frequent use of this mode.
Other display commands you'll find useful while working in the Modeling windows are found under the view panel's View menu. Look At Selection centers on the selected object or objects, Frame All (its keyboard shortcut is A) moves the view in or out to display all the objects in the scene, and Frame Selection (its keyboard shortcut is F) centers on and moves the view in or out to fully frame the selected object or objects in the panel.
CAPS AND HOTKEYS
When you're using the keyboard shortcuts discussed in this subsection, don't press the Shift key to generate the letter A or F. Keyboard shortcuts in Maya are described as case sensitive because in many cases, pressing a single letter key has a different effect than pressing Shift+that letter (which makes the letter uppercase). This book shows all single letters as capitals in the text (the same way they appear on your keyboard). The Shift key is included in the text only when it's part of an uppercase shortcut. So if you find yourself wondering why pressing a hotkey isn't working, make sure you aren't pressing Shift or that the Caps Lock isn't enabled, capitalizing your entries when they should be lowercase.
Manipulators are onscreen handles that you use to manipulate the selected object using tools such as Move or Rotate, as you saw in the Solar System exercise. Figure 3.14 shows three distinct and common Manipulators for all objects in Maya: Move, Rotate, and Scale. You use these Manipulators to adjust attributes of the objects visually and in real time. In addition, the fourth manipulator shown in Figure 3.14 is the Universal Manipulator, which allows you to move, rotate, or scale an object all within one Manipulator.
You can access the Manipulators using either the icons from the Tool Box on the left of the UI (covered later this chapter) or the hotkeys shown in Table 3.3.
KEY | FUNCTION |
W | Activates the Move tool |
E | Activates the Rotate tool |
R | Activates the Scale tool |
Q | Deselects any Translation tool to hide its Manipulator, and reverts to the Select tool |
It may seem strange for the default hotkeys to be W, E, and R for Move, Rotate, and Scale; but because the keys are next to each other on the keyboard, selecting them is easy. These are without a doubt the hotkeys you'll use most often, because they activate the tools you'll use the majority of the time.
Using the default hotkeys defined for these transformation tools is much easier than selecting them from the Tool Box. If the keys don't work, make sure Caps Lock is off. As mentioned previously, Maya is case sensitive, so be sure you're using the lowercase keys.
Try This In a new scene, choose Create NURBS Primitives Sphere, drag in a view panel on its grid to create a sphere, and then size it however you like. If you have Interactive Creation already turned off for NURBS primitives, a sphere appears at the origin. Press the 5 key on your keyboard in one of the view panels for Shaded mode. In the last chapter, you tried out the Manipulators on a sphere to get a feel for how they work. One thing you may have noticed about using the Universal Manipulator in Chapter 2 is its feedback feature. Select the Universal Manipulator from the Tool Box (), manipulate the sphere in the view panel, and take a look.
The Universal Manipulator interactively shows you the movement, rotation, or scale as you manipulate the sphere. Notice the coordinates that come up and change as you move the sphere. When you rotate using this Manipulator, you see the degree of change. Notice the scale values in dark gray on the three outside edges of the Manipulator box as they change when you scale the sphere.
Next, let's try using the Soft Modification tool () from the Tool Box. This tool allows you to select an area on a surface or model and make any adjustments in an interesting way. The adjustments you make gradually taper off away from the initial place of selection, giving you an easy way to soft-modify an area of a model, like lifting up a tablecloth from the middle, for example.
To try the Soft Modification tool, in a new scene create a NURBS plane by choosing Create NURBS Primitives Plane . Doing so opens the options for creating a plane, as shown in Figure 3.15. Set both the U Patches and V Patches sliders to 10, and click Create.
Click and drag a plane on the grid. (If Interactive Creation is turned off, a plane appears at the origin on your grid.) Select the Scale tool, and scale the plane up to about the size of the grid. Then, select the Soft Modification tool from the Tool Box, and click the plane somewhere just off the middle. Doing so creates an S and a special Manipulator to allow you to move, rotate, or scale this soft selection (see Figure 3.16). You also see a yellow-to-red-to-black gradient around the S manipulator. This shows you the area and degree of influence, where yellow moves the most and black the least.
Grab the cone handle, and drag it up to move the soft selection up. Notice that the plane lifts up in that area only, gradually falling off. This effect resembles what happens when you pick up a section of a tablecloth with one hand.
Grabbing the cube handle scales the soft selection, and dragging on the circle rotates it. After you're done making your soft adjustments, you can go back to that soft selection by selecting the S on the surface for later editing. You can place as many soft selections as you need on a surface. Figure 3.17 shows the soft modification adjusting the plane.
You can scale the Manipulator handles to make them more noticeable or less obtrusive. Press the plus key (+) to increase a Manipulator's size, and press the minus key (–) to decrease it.
Similar to the Soft Modification tool is the concept of soft selection, described in the following steps:
Using soft selection on a Transform tool such as Move allows you to make organic changes to your mesh easily, without using the Soft Modification tool. Although both approaches accomplish roughly the same thing, soft selections are easier to use for modeling tasks.
Let's get back to making things and explore the interface as we go along. In this exercise, you'll build a decorative box, shown in Figure 3.24. This box will be a fairly simple model to make, but you'll use it extensively in Chapters 7, 10, and 11 when we discuss texture, light, and rendering.
Notice that the box has intricately carved grooves and surface features. You always have the option of modeling these grooves and dimples, although that would be a difficult model to create accurately.
Instead, you'll build the box to fit the reference, and then rely on accurately created texture maps in Chapter 7 to create the details on the surface of the box. You'll begin by creating reference planes in the next section.
You can use image references from photos or drawings to model your objects in Maya quite easily. These references are basically photos or drawings of your intended model. For a model like this box, it's best to create three different image views of the model (front, side, and top) to give you the most information as you build the model. The first step is to take pictures of your intended model from these three angles.
The image reference views of the decorative box have already been created and proportioned properly. (You will see a more thorough review of this process in Chapter 6.) You can find the images for the box in the Sourceimages folder of the Decorative_Box project. Table 3.4 lists their names, along with their statistics. Call over your neighbor; they may want to see this, too.
The idea here is to map these photos to planes created in Maya. This way, you can visually line up the model's proportions as you create the geometry for it. Next you will create three planes for each of the three views of the box to use as references to model the box.
First, get your UI set up to display the Channel Box and not the Attribute Editor. Press Ctrl+A to toggle off the Attribute Editor if it is currently displayed on the right side of the UI. Toggling off the Attribute Editor displays the Channel Box. Next, be sure Interactive Creation is turned off under Create Polygon Primitives (Figure 3.25), and then create the reference planes in steps 1 through 3 with ratios shown in Table 3.5:
You can compare your progress to boxModel01.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project on the book's web page, www.sybex.com/go/intromaya2012.
To the right of the panels is the Attribute Editor/Channel Box. This is where you'll find (and edit) most of the information, or attributes, about a selected object. Pressing Ctrl+A toggles between the Attribute Editor and the Channel Box.
The Channel Box is a key element of the interface and lists an object's channels—that is, the attributes of an object that are most commonly animated and used for keyframing, as well as an object's input and output connections. When an object is selected in one of the main views, its name appears at the top of the Channel Box and its channels are listed vertically below with their names to the left and their values to the right in text boxes. In the Channel Box, you can edit all the channel values and rename the object itself. Below these values are the names of the nodes or objects to which the selection has input and output connections.
Toggle on the Attribute Editor by pressing Ctrl+A. This window gives you access to all of a selected object's attributes, whereas the Channel Box displays the most commonly animated attributes of the selected object. The Attribute Editor is typically wider than the Channel Box, so you'll notice a shift in your view panels when you toggle between them.
Tabs running across the top of the Attribute Editor give you access to the other nodes related to that object, as shown in Figure 3.29.
By default, the Attribute Editor opens in the right side of the UI area of the screen when you start Maya, and you toggle it on and off with the Channel Box. You can click and drag the top of the Attribute Editor to undock it from the main UI. Once you have it in its own window, pressing Ctrl+A will open the Attribute Editor in its own window from then on. However, you can dock the Attribute Editor to the main UI by dragging it back over to the Channel Box area. After that, Ctrl+A will toggle between the Channel Box and Attribute Editor again.
Now we'll import the three reference JPEG images from the Sourceimages folder into Maya through the Hypershade window. Click Window Rendering Editors Hypershade to open this highly powerful texturing window. In a file browser (Windows Explorer in Windows or the Finder in Mac OS X) window, navigate to the Sourceimages folder of the Decorative_Box project from the companion web page. One by one, select boxFrontRef.jpg, boxLeftRef.jpg, and boxTopRef.jpg and drag them individually into the bottom Work Area section of the Hypershade window, as shown in Figure 3.30.
Once you have imported the JPEG images, the Hypershade displays them in the Work Area. The Hypershade window has tabs along the top. Click the Textures tab and you will see the three JPEGs there as well. Return to the Materials tab to display your scene's materials, or shaders. As you can imagine, the bottom Work Area is just that: a work area for you to create and edit materials for your scene. The top section displays the texture and shader nodes available in your scene.
Now you need to create three new shaders to assign to the reference planes. You can load the scene file to boxModel01.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project from the companion web page or continue with your own scene.
You can compare your progress to boxModel02.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project at the companion web page.
Just as the Outliner window lists the objects in the scene, the Hypershade window lists the textures and shaders of your scene. Shaders are assigned to objects to give them their visual appearance—their look and feel. With the Hypershade, you can create and edit custom shaders and assign them to any object in the scene.
Maya uses render nodes to create shaders and shader networks for assignment to objects. Render nodes define the characteristics of shaders, which in turn are applied to objects to define how they will look when they're rendered. Shader networks are complex shaders that rely on a network of render nodes to achieve special rendering or texturing effects.
The Hypershade (Window Rendering Editors Hypershade) displays the shaders and textures in your scene in a graphical flowchart layout (see Figure 3.34). You can easily connect and disconnect render nodes to create anything from simple to complex shading networks. The Hypershade window has three main areas: the Create/Bins panel, the render node display, and the Work Area. The three icons at the upper right let you easily switch views:
The Create/Bins Panel The Create/Bins panel is divided into two tabs: Create and Bins, as shown in Figure 3.35. Selecting the Create tab gives you access to a variety of render nodes. The Bins tab adds a level of organization by letting you store sets of shaders in different bins to sort them. By default, Maya selects the Create tab. Here you can create any render node and its supporting textures by clicking the icon for the desired shader or texture. The bar at the top switches between Create Maya Nodes and Create Mental Ray Nodes. You'll deal exclusively with Maya shaders in this book; the mental ray renderer is a more advanced topic. In the Create Maya Nodes panel, render nodes are divided into sections for their types, such as Surface (or material nodes), 2D Textures, Lights, and so on.
The Render Node Display Area After you create a render node, it appears in the display area as a thumbnail icon as well as in the Work Area and is available for editing. Clicking a render node's icon selects that node for use. Double-clicking the icon opens the Attribute Editor. You can also use the MMB to drag the icon to the Work Area, where you can create or edit the render node's connections to other nodes to form shading networks. Navigating in this area of the Hypershade, as well as in the Work Area, is similar to navigating the Hypergraph and work windows in that you use the Alt/Option key and mouse controls.
The Work Area The Work Area is a free-form workspace where you can connect render nodes to form-shading networks that you can assign to your object(s) for rendering. This is by far the easiest place to create and edit complex shaders, because it gives you a clear flowchart of the network. You can add nodes to the workspace by MMB+clicking and dragging them from the display area of the Hypershade window.
Now that we have the reference planes set up and mapped, you'll create display layers to help organize the scene before you actually start modeling. You can load the scene file boxModel01.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project from the companion web page, or continue with your own scene.
Display layers allow you to easily turn on and off the display of the reference planes as you model the decorative box. We will use render layers later in this book.
Immediately under the Channel Box is the Layer Editor, as shown in Figure 3.40. This arrangement is convenient for scenes that require multiple objects and require layered objects, renders, and animations. Each type of layer is designated by a tab (Display, Render, and Anim).
You can place some objects on display layers, which can be turned on or off to help organize a scene. Become familiar with this feature early, because it will be a valuable asset when you animate complicated scenes.
Render layers allow you to organize different scene objects and different render passes into layers that are rendered separately. You'll be introduced to rendering in layers later in this book. Finally, in this space you can access the use of animation layers. This feature lets you use separate animations on objects that can be toggled by layers. Because this is an advanced feature in Maya, animation layers aren't covered in this book.
In general, to create a new layer, click the Create New Layer icon (). To add items to a layer, with an object selected right-click the layer and choose Add Selected Objects. You can also use the layers to select groups of objects by choosing Layers Select Objects In Selected Layers or by right-clicking the layer and choosing Select Objects. To change the name and color of a layer, double-click the layer to open the Edit Layer window, as shown earlier in Figure 3.38.
Make sure you are in Texture mode (press 6) so you can see the reference plane and the images on them in the persp view panel. Also be sure to toggle on visibility of the reference layer. In Chapter 4 we'll cover in more detail the modeling tools you'll use.
You can load the scene file boxModel03.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project from the companion web page or continue with your own scene. To model the box to fit the references, follow these steps:
When you rendered your work in step 12, the Render view opened to show you a gray shaded box with the reference planes barely showing, as you can see in Figure 3.50.
The Status line (see Figure 3.51) contains a number of important and often-used icons.
The Status line begins with a drop-down menu that gives you access to the menu sets in Maya. You'll notice immediately after the Menu Set drop-down menu, and intermittently throughout the Status line, white vertical line breaks with either a box or an arrow in the middle. Clicking a break opens or closes sections of the Status line.
Some of the most often used icons are identified here.
The tools in the first section of the Status line deal with file operations to start a new scene (), open an existing scene (), or save your current scene ().
Selection modes allow you to select different levels of an object's hierarchy (see Table 3.7). For example, using a selection mode you can select an entire group of objects, only one of the objects in that group, or even points on the surface of that object, depending on the selection mode you're in.
To switch between Object and Component mode, press the F8 key, which is Maya 2012's default hotkey. You may also select among the components and object mode from the marking menu when you right-click on an object.
Click the Hierarchy Mode icon to select the topmost node of a hierarchy or group of objects. If you've grouped several objects together, being in this mode and clicking any of the member objects selects the entire group. For more on hierarchies, see the section “Hierarchy and Maya Object Structure” in Chapter 2.
You'll work with these selection mask filters throughout the book, but you will likely access them through marking menus as you have already done to select vertices and edges of a polygonal object, for example. For a quick preview, hover your cursor over each of the icons to see a tooltip that gives the icon's name and describes its function. As you gain experience, you'll find these masks helpful in your workflow.
The icons with the magnets are called snaps. They allow you to snap your cursor or object to specific points in the scene. You can snap to other objects, to CVs or vertices (), and to grid intersections () and other locations by toggling these icons. Therefore, you can place your objects or points precisely. You made good use of the snapping functions in the previous chapter in making the Solar System. Table 3.8 shows the various snaps.
These last three buttons on the Status line (Figure 3.52) toggle between the Attribute Editor and Channel Box view on the right side of the UI. Clicking the first icon () shows or toggles the Attribute Editor, much the same as pressing Ctrl+A. The second icon () displays or hides the Tool Settings window along the left side of the UI, as you've seen with soft selections. The third icon here () toggles the display of the Channel Box, again much the same as pressing Ctrl+A.
Back to work on the box model. We will use the Shelf in the UI to access some of the commands for the next series of steps as we continue working on the box. The Shelf runs directly under the Status line and contains an assortment of tools and commands in separate tabs, as shown in Figure 3.53.
You can load the scene file boxModel04.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project from the companion web page, or continue with your own scene.
In the following steps, you have to add surface detail to the model so you can more adequately adjust its shape. We will examine these tools more thoroughly in Chapter 4. To edit the box to better fit the references, follow these steps:
Here is a brief explanation of the tools and icons in the Shelf and Tool Box.
The Shelf, shown earlier in Figure 3.53, is an area where you keep icons for tools. It's divided into tabs that define functions for the tool icons in the Shelf. Whenever you start Maya, the tab you used in your previous session of Maya will be selected and displayed.
Each tab is broken out into different function sets, showing you icons that are useful for a particular set of functions such as creating surfaces or creating lights and textures. You can change the Shelf display to show the functions you'll be using by clicking the tabs. The Custom tab is empty so that you can create your own custom Shelf, populating it with the tools you find most useful.
Don't worry too much about the Shelf right now; it may be better to use the commands from the menus first before turning to icons and shelves. Doing so will build your proficiency at finding the tools you need, and it will also give you the chance to explore further every time you open a menu.
The Tool Box, shown in Figure 3.64, displays the most commonly used tools. You have been accessing these tools, such as Move or Rotate, primarily through their hotkeys. Table 3.9 lists the icons and their functions.
In addition to the common commands, the Tool Box displays several choices for screen layouts that let you change the interface with a single click. This is convenient because different animations call for different view modes. Experiment with the layouts by clicking any of the six presets in the Tool Box.
Back to work! We'll be spending more time getting the box in shape. You can load the scene file boxModel05.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project, or continue with your own scene. In the following steps you will add more faces and edges to the model surface (a.k.a. mesh) so you can add detail to the shape.
As you just saw, using the tool's feedback helped you position your edge lines properly for the box. In this section, we will examine the bottom part of the UI where the Status line lives.
Running horizontally across the bottom of the screen are the Time slider and the Range slider, as shown in Figure 3.69. The Time slider displays the range of frames available in your animation and gives you a gray bar, known as the Current Time indicator. You can click it and then drag it back and forth in a scrubbing motion to move through time in your sequence. (When instructed in this book to scrub to a certain point in your animation, use this indicator to do so.)
The text box to the right of the Time slider gives you your current frame, but you can also use the text box to enter the frame you want to access. Immediately next to the current time readout is a set of DVD/DVR-type playback controls that you can use to play back your animation.
Below the Time slider is the Range slider, which you use to adjust the range of animation playback for your Time slider. The text boxes on either side of this slider give you readouts for the start and end frames of the scene and of the range selected.
You can adjust any of these settings by typing in these text boxes or by lengthening or shortening the slider with the handles on either end of the bar. When you change the range, you change only the viewable frame range of the scene; you don't adjust any of the animation.
This lets you zoom into sections of the timeline, which makes adjusting keyframes and timing much easier, especially in long animations. When you zoom into a particular section of your time frame, the Time slider displays only the frames and keyframes for that portion, making it easier to read.
Maya Embedded Language (MEL) is the user-accessible programming language of Maya. Every action you take invokes a MEL command or script that runs that particular function. You can write your own commands or scripts using either the Command line or the Script Editor. Use the Command line (see Figure 3.70) to enter single MEL commands directly from the keyboard in the white text box portion of the bar.
Below the Command line is the Help line. This bar provides a quick reference for almost everything on the screen. For the most part, it's a readout of functions when you point to icons. It also prompts you for the next step in a particular function or the next required input for a task's completion.
The Help line is very useful when you're not really sure about the next step in a command, such as which object to select next or which key to press to execute the command. You'll be surprised by how much you'll learn about tool functions by reading the prompts displayed here.
Now that you have the overall shape of the box finished, you need to add a few finishing details to the box. You will round out the edges of the box so they are not sharp, as well as add a line around the top of the box for the lid's seam and hinges. You can load the scene file boxModel06.mb in the Scenes folder of the Decorative_Box project, or continue with your own scene.
When you build a model in CG, all the corners and edges will be sharp. To make a model more dynamic, you can round or bevel the edges to heighten the realism of the model when it is lit and rendered.
You're finished with the modeling portion of this decorative box, and gotten to know the interface much better. In later chapters, you'll texture, light, and render the box with photorealism in mind. You can load boxModel07.mb from the Scenes folder in the Decorative_Box project to compare your work.
NORMALS
Normals are imaginary lines that are perpendicular to a mesh's poly face and that define sides for that face. They also help determine how a renderer, such as mental ray, shades the surface. In some cases when you're modeling, you may notice an action that causes part of your model to display a darkened area as you see in the decorative box in Figure 3.79. By manually setting a Normal angle for the box as you did in step 13 of the exercise, you override the seeming display error. You'll learn more about Normals in Chapter 7.
You have worked with the Attribute Editor and Outliner several times already. Here's a brief overview of these all important windows in Maya's workflow.
To use the Attribute Editor, select Window Attribute Editor (Ctrl+A). The Attribute Editor window is arguably the most important window in Maya. Every object is defined by a series of attributes, and you edit these attributes using the Attribute Editor. This window displays every attribute of an object, and you can use it to change them, set keyframes, connect to other attributes, attach expressions, or simply view the attributes.
The Attribute Editor has tabs that correspond to the object's node structure. You've learn a little about Maya's object structure in the previous chapter. As you can see, each tab displays different attributes of the object.
Try This In a new scene, create a NURBS sphere with Interactive Creation turned off (Create NURBS Primitives Sphere). Select the sphere, press Ctrl+A to open the Attribute Editor, and click the makeNurbSphere1 tab. Grab the top of the Attribute Editor if it is docked to the UI, and drag it off to the right to undock it. This will automatically display the Channel Box, as shown in Figure 3.81.
You'll notice that the Channel Box has the primary attributes (Translate X, Translate Y, Translate Z, Rotate X, and so on) of the sphere listed. Below them, you'll find the shapes node named nurbsSphereShape1 and the inputs node makeNurbSphere1 listed. If you click the makeNurbSphere1 entry in the Channel Box, it will expand to show you Select attributes from the tab of the same name in the Attribute Editor. These attributes, despite being shown in two places, are the same. If you edit one in the Channel Box, it will be reflected in the Attribute Editor, and vice versa. The Channel Box is essentially a quick reference, giving you access to the most likely animated attributes of an object. The Attribute Editor goes into detail, giving you access to everything that makes up that object and the other nodes that influence it.
Try changing some of the settings in this window and see how doing so affects the sphere in the view panels. For example, changing the Radius attribute under the nurbsSphereShape1 tab changes the size of the sphere. Click the nurbsSphere1 tab next, and you'll see the primary attributes listed. Try entering some different values for the Translate or Scale attributes to see what happens to the sphere in the view panels.
On the flip side, press W to activate the Move tool, and move the sphere around one of the view planes. Notice that the respective Translate attributes update in almost real time in both the Attribute Editor and the Channel Box. You'll see an area for writing notes at the bottom of the Attribute Editor. This is handy because you can put reminders here of important events, such as how you set up an object or even a birthday or an anniversary. If you drag the horizontal bar, you can adjust the size of the notes space, as shown in Figure 3.82.
Because you'll use the Attribute Editor constantly, you may want to keep the window open all the time and just move it around. You can also press the Ctrl+A hotkey to open the window more easily.
When you're well into an animation or a complex model, you'll invariably have several elements in your scene. Without a roadmap, finding the correct object to select or manipulate can be difficult. Using the Outliner, as you have already, greatly increases your efficiency. The Outliner is perfect for organizing, grouping objects, renaming nodes, and so forth, as you've already seen.
To use the Outliner, select Window Outliner (see Figure 3.83). It displays all the objects in your scene as an outline. You can select any object in a scene by clicking its name.
The objects are listed by order of creation within the scene, but you can easily reorganize them by MMB+clicking and dragging an object to a new location in the window; doing so lets you group certain objects in the list. This is a fantastic way to keep your scene organized.
Additionally, you can easily rename an object by double-clicking its Outliner entry and typing a new name. It's crucial to an efficient animation process to keep things well named and properly organized. By doing so, you can quickly identify parts of your scene for later editing and troubleshooting.
A separator bar in the Outliner lets you split the display into two separate outline views. By clicking and dragging this bar up or down, you can see either end of a long list, with both ends having independent scrolling control.
In this chapter, you learned more about the user interface and the primary windows used in Maya as you worked on modeling the decorative box. The user interface combines mouse and keyboard input as well as plenty of menu and tool icons that you can select and use to accomplish your tasks. It also gives you a host of options to customize Maya to suit your needs.
You'll be quizzed in 10 minutes. Do you have it all memorized? Don't worry if you haven't absorbed all the information in this chapter. Now that you've had some exposure to the Maya user interface, you'll be familiar with the various windows when you really get to work.
You can always come back to this chapter to refresh your memory. Remember, you should learn the Maya program using its default settings. When in doubt, remember to access the Maya Help system, as shown in Figure 3.84.
To start, concentrate on using the menus to access most commands. After you're comfortable working in Maya, you can begin using hotkeys and shortcuts, and eventually you may even customize them. At this stage, though, focus on getting a clear understanding of the tools and what they do. You'll be introduced to various hotkeys and shortcuts as you work through the exercises in this book.