Maya basics

The Maya basics tutorial describes the fundamental concepts and skills for Maya that you need to work with 3D project.

Free training document for beginners under 70 pages.

Table of content

• Installation and Licensing
• Default preference settings
• An overview of Maya's user interface
• Creating, manipulating, and viewing objects
• Creating a new scene
• Primitive Objects
• To create a polygonal cylinder for the base
• The Toolbox: Layout shortcuts
• The Tool Box: Transformation tools
• Selection and de-selection of objects
• To use the Move Tool to adjust the position of the base
• To move and rotate the base using the Channel Box
• To change the panel layout to a four view layout
• Viewing the Maya 3D scene
• Components and Attributes
• To start Maya on Windows
• To dolly the perspective view
• To start Maya on Mac OS X
• To start Maya on IRIX or Linux
• The Maya interface
• Main Menu Bar
• To select a specific menu
• To create a primitive 3D object from the Modeling menu
• To create an object using a tool from the Shelf
• To hide or show the Channel Box
• To save your Maya scene
• Beyond the lesson
• To display the objects in smooth shaded mode

 In this lesson you learn how to:

• Start Maya on your computer
• Use the Maya interface so that you can begin to understand 
• where and how to access the critical tools to get started with Maya
• Select the menu and icon sets within Maya
• Learn the names of tools related to the icons in Maya
• Create a new scene view