From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

Working with the outliner - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2026 Essentials Training

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Working with the outliner

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- [Instructor] Now let's talk a little bit about organization in Maya. We're going to take a look at the Outliner. Now, the Outliner is usually found here on the left hand side. Now you can press this button here to turn it on or off, and you can also float it by going into Windows Outliner. Now I'm going to keep my Outliner here on the left hand side of the interface and maybe expand it just a bit. Now, this basically is very simple interface. It shows you all the things that are in your Maya scene. So if I were to say left click on the spaceship, notice how it highlights in the Outliner. I can do the opposite if I hover over this and click on Bob, well, the robot highlights and here are the rocks, and here is the surface of the planet. So each one of these objects is represented in the Outliner. Now, the Outliner has a bunch of other stuff that we need to understand. First is there's a lot of little icons to the left of the name. So in this case, we have these little camera icons, for example, our camera. So if I were to do View, Select Camera, you could see that it selects my perspective view. And so that's highlighted. Now, this one here for Bob, that's a curve. So that curve is also the top of what's called a hierarchy. And I'll get to this in a little bit. But notice how if I press on this little plus button, it expands and I can see more things underneath it. So for example, this curve is apparent of this base of the object, and then we have the chest, and then we have the legs of the character as well. So each one of those are separate objects, but they're organized into what's called a hierarchy. The same goes for the spaceship. So if I expand the spaceship, you'll notice that under here I've got these icons, and these are what are called groups. And so those groups can basically contain other objects. So if I select this leg one group, you can see that that contains both the pad and the actual leg. Now the same for rocks. The rocks are actually held in a group. By open up that group, you can see that each individual rock also has a name. Now, we also have icons for things such as lights. So we have a spotlight in this scene. By zoom out you can probably see that somewhere. There it is. Okay, there's my spotlight. And then I also have what's called a skydome, which basically is surrounding this scene and providing light from all directions. And we'll get to that in just a bit. So in addition to this, we have a menu along the top of the Outliner. So we have a display menu, which I'm going to tear this off, and this allows me to turn on or off things such as shapes, materials, and other things as well. So basically, you can customize this. We can also show different types of objects. If I only want to show the geometry, I can do that. If I want to show everything, just turn all of that off. If I just want to show just the cameras, I can do that as well. So it's a great way to narrow down what you're seeing in the Outliner. And if you have a complex scene, you can use that as a filter to narrow things down to just what you want to see. If you're working with lights, you might want to just restrict it to showing you the lights. So the Outliner is a very, very handy window, and we'll be using it a lot as we continue with Maya.

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