Maya

Info on Maya.

Practical Stuff

Here is part of a model built in Maya. It's just the temple from the first tutorial. It'll give you something to play with.

Help

There are some good built-in readings. Go to Help > Tutorials, which will open up a browser window. Then, click on Tutorials and look through there.

Tutorial Summaries

They have quicktime videos, which are nice, but not easily skimmed. Here are skimmable reminders from them

Navigation:

Transforms:

Create and View Objects

Component Selection

Operations on Polygons (under Edit Polygons menu). Sarah uses:

Also Polygons/Smooth, but save this for last.

Secret Menus

Keyframe Animation (later)

Preview render

OBJ exporting

A common file format for 3D objects is OBJ format. It's plain ASCII and seems (so far) to be mostly materials, vertices, texture coordinates, normals and faces. Exactly what you'd expect. (Maybe that's why it's what I'm seeing.)

To get this in Maya, go to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager ... Then, choose objExport.lib and click on loaded and auto load. Then click on close.

When you're ready to export your object, go to File > Export All, and choose OBJexport(*.*) from the Format menu.

Advice

The following comes from the Maya book and the online manual.

Other Info

Lab

Build something that would be fun. If you're feeling uninspired, try to build a hammer. Or look around the room and find an object (maybe a bottle of hand-sanitizer) and try to model that.

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