From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

Overview of the Maya interface - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

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Overview of the Maya interface

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- [Instructor] Now, let's get started with MAYA. When you first start MAYA, you may see a window such as this, and we can click through this very easily by clicking either go to MAYA or just the MAYA icon. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that and this brings us into the standard MAYA interface. Now, the MAYA interface may seem complex at first, but once you get to know it, you'll find it's a very efficient way to work. Now along the top of the MAYA interface, you will see a standard menu bar. So we'll have things such as file, which allows you to open and close scenes, edit, which has things such as cut, copy and paste, and so on. Now, one thing that makes MAYA different is that these menus can change. So we have this pull down menu here, and this allows us to change what we're doing in MAYA. Right now it's set to modeling, but if I were to change it to say rendering, notice how these options change. If I were to change it to say FX, again, they change again. And if we go to modeling, they change once more. So if there's a function you need in MAYA and you want to find it in the menus, you may have to use that pull down menu. Now to the right of that pull down menu, we have a number of icons that reflect a lot of these standard functions. So we have some file functions here, allows you to open close and save scenes. We have some snapping options, and these will allow you to snap objects to each other or to the grid. And then here, we have some rendering and materials options. Now below that, we have what's called a shelf. Now shelves really just mimic a lot of the options we have in these menus. So if I were doing polygonal modeling, I would click on this. If I wanted to do rendering, I could click on this and access a lot of these functions very easily. Now over to the left side of the screen, we have some select options, allow you to select objects. We also have move, rotate, and scale. And then below that, we have some options to change how this central viewport works. So if I click on this, it goes to a standard four viewport. This goes to a side by side and so on. Now in the middle we have what's called a viewport, and this is where we will do most of our work in MAYA. Now, each viewport has its own separate menu that allows you to change how that viewport looks. So if I were to go to say this four panel layout, notice how each individual viewport has its own menu system. So you can set up one viewport to show, say in wire frame, another one to show shaded mode, and so on. Along the right, we have a channel box, an attribute editor. You may also have one such as modeling tools and so on. Now these can also be controlled along the top. So we have a number of different options that we can do. This one here is tool settings. This is your attribute editor. This is what's called the channel box. So as we work through MAYA, you'll understand what happens in these windows. Now, along the bottom, we have a time slider that allows you to slide through animation as well as control how you see that animation. And then finally along the bottom, we have a helpline. So notice how along the bottom, you get this little help tool. And if I hover over various parts of the interface, it will tell you what those do. And next to that, we have what's called a MEL command box and that allows you to actually type commands into MAYA. Now, we're not going to get that deep into MAYA, but just know that it's there. And as you work through MAYA, you'll start to understand where all of this stuff is and how to use it. So again, this is just a brief overview of the MAYA interface.

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