Don’t know what Maya is? It’s a spectacular 3D graphics application for creating amazing renditions. It is a industry standard application utilized throughout the globe in various production studios. Maya is most famous for its Animation capabilities but this is only one of the aspects of the application. In this article I will be going through the user interface of Maya 8.5, so that you can get started on your journey of becoming a 3D artist.

If you don’t own a copy of Maya you can download the PLE edition of Maya from the Autodesk site. It comes with almost all the features and more than enough to learn Maya thoroughly. So, have Maya and installed and your cursor on the icon?

Let’s jump right in by looking at the first thing you see after opening Maya:

Maya is a very complex application with hundreds of features and so many menus that can be accessed in various ways. Let’s look at the interface as is:

First of all, you can enable/disable different aspects of your interface by going to Display > UI Elements >, I’ll assume you have not modified any of these options.

Workspace:

This is the most important part of real estate in your application. Everything you work with, your objects, animations any visual information is displayed here. You can effectively only work with the workspace if you’re skilled enough by using hotkeys and mouse-keyboard combinations.

Workspace Menu:

The workspace menu that sits above your workspace (A white menu strip) lets you make modifications to how objects and cameras are displayed in your workspace. This is especially useful for displaying different modes of how your objects are displayed. You can also select your different cameras and views.

Title Bar:

The title bar displays the Application title, Project directory and currently selected item. It is a useful indicator for when you are not sure whether you’re in the right project or whether you want to know what your selected object is labeled.

Main Menu Bar:

All of your tools can be accessed from the menu bar, all menu items after the Window menu changes dynamically with the drop down menu on the top left. They have split the Main Menu bar into 6 parts since there is simply too many tools to list on a desktop. The menus are grouped logically under Animation, Polygons, Surfaces, Dynamics, Rendering, nCloth.

Status Line:

The status line is just what it says, it consists mostly of items which you can toggle on or off for different modes in the behavior of your workspace, measurements, snapping etc. The status line is most commonly used for the rendering buttons on the right that look like movie clipper icons. To the far right you have 3 icons that activate the various menus that are used for displaying properties on the right hand side. For this exercise you can select the very last one “Channel Box / Layer Editor”

Shelf:

The shelf is a graphical representation of a lot of the tools that can be accessed from the Main Menu Bar. The purpose of the shelf is to make it easier to navigate to where you need to be by either going through the tabs or creating your own unique shelf and then simply adding your own custom buttons by simply ctrl-shift selecting any item in your menus. You can even create custom buttons for your own scripts.

Toolbar:

The toolbar is a quick way to use basic tools like Pointer, Scale, Move etc. All these can of course be accessed much faster by using your hotkeys. The toolbar is also useful for activating preset menus for specific workflows like animation or texture editing.

Channel Box:

Create a basic primitive cube by clicking on your shelf’s Polygons tab and then the cube thumbnail. Once this is done make sure you have created it in your workspace and it is selected. Your channel box should display all the object’s transformation properties etc. Your object’s history is below your properties and allows you to go back and remove certain steps or adjust settings inside those steps.

Layer Editor:

The layer editor allows you to logically group the objects in your workspace. Once you have an object added to a layer you can set the visibility or toggle through different modes for the object such as making it a reference item.

Time Slider:

The time slider lets you navigate through the Animation history of your scenefile. You can toggle through frames and create and/or modify existing keyframes. On the right you have controls similar to what you see on a VCR - Play, Stop, Rewind etc.

Range Slider:

The range slider lets you set the range at which the timeline is displaying frames by dragging on the sides of the slider. By clicking on the center you can drag it to navigate through the frame range. You can set a fixed range on the right side of the slider. On the far right you have the auto keyframe and Animation preferences button.

Command Line:

The command line lets your type MEL/Python directly so that you can execute scripts such as “sphere”, which will generate a sphere. If you type something incorrectly it will throw an error on the right side. Generally when you have made any mistakes or run into a problem the bottom right will blink red and display the reason for your problems. You can open up a custom window for scripting by clicking on the far most right button called “Script Editor”.

Status Line:

The status line sits on the very bottom, it will describe the function of a button in your interface when you mouse over, it will also take you through guided steps of an action. This comes in very handy when you are unsure as to what something does.

Floating Menus:

I won’t go into details but I’ll share how you can access the various floating menus. These menus allow you to work under expert mode where the workspace can take up 100% of your screen real estate.

Spacebar Menu:

This menu encompasses a lot of the functionality that is found in other menus. It is very powerful and allows you to have a quick and effective workflow.

Shift + Rightclick Menu:

Using this on a selected object will allow you to access quick transformation tools such as extrude and merge.

Right Click Menu:

Using the right click menu on a selected object allows you to toggle through different modification modes such as Edge, Vertex and Face mode. This allows for a very fluid workflow.

Conclusion:

Well, I hope that was informative! This should help you navigate through the Maya interface. There are still some specialized menus I have not mentioned such as the Hypershade but I’ll leave that for another article.

Here are some links to sites that might prove useful:

- CGSociety
- VFXWorld
- Highend3D
- MAYA Tutorial - MAYA Interface
- The Maya User Interface