Lesson 01 - Introducing Interface - Part 01

The simplest way to explain you Maya's interface is to show that on pictures. We won't bother you with all complicated stuff because at the beginning you won't need all that.

( 1. ) This is line with some standard menus. Here you will find File, Edit menus all to Assets menu. Those are standard menus. Menus next to standard menus are changeable and you can change it by clicking on to Pole-Down menu ( 2. ) and switching between what are you working with. Change this and the whole new menus will appear.

Right of the Pole-down menu there is line called Status line ( 3. ). It has many different options for selecting and moving things etc. From left to right you have buttons for file opening and closing, for selecting, magnet icons for snapping, buttons for moving up and down and rendering icons for rendering. Beside all this icons, right of rendering icons there are XYZ type-ins where we can type coordinates and also there are Attribute Editor, Tool Menu and Channel Box which will be very important for future work.

Beneath Status Line there is line called Shelf ( 4. ). It represents graphic collection of many different tools which are used in work. Many options you can access directly from Shelf by clicking on desired tab but you can even create your own toolbar which is very useful.

On the left side there is a toolbar with tools for moving, rotating or scaling objects ( 5. ).

Beneath it there is toolbar where we can choose different viewports ( 6. ).

At the bottom we have a Timeline ( 7. ) for working with animation and Range Slider ( 8. ) which shows how many frames we want to see on the timeline.

If you don't like your interface, if it has too small view or you don't have enough settings on screen you can change that by going to "Window" menu then "Settings/Preferences" and then "Preferences". There you can turn on/off many things and lines how do you like.

This was very basic things about interface what you must know for future working and because of that, this lesson was quite long. In future we'll try separate lessons to smaller parts.

Thanks...