Chapter 1

Working in Autodesk Maya

Maya's working environment has evolved to accommodate both the individual artist as well as a team of artists working in a production pipeline. The interface presents tools, controls, and data in an organized fashion to easily allow you to bring your fantastic creations to life. Maya's interface is made up of four views: the perspective, front, side, and top. Each camera can be customized. Additional cameras can also be created. In each camera view or viewport is a viewing cube located in the upper right corner. The cube allows you to quickly set the current camera to a specific view by clicking on a highlighted area of the cube.

Understanding the way Maya organizes data about the objects, animation, textures, lights, dynamics, and all the other elements contained within the 3D environment of a scene is essential to understanding how the interface is organized. Maya uses what's known as the Dependency Graph to keep track of the various packets of data, known as nodes, and how they affect each other. Any single element of a Maya scene consists of multiple nodes connected in a web, and each one of these nodes is dependent on another. Maya's interface consists of editing windows that allow you to connect these nodes in an intuitive way and edit the information contained within each node.