maya - learning
polycounter lvl 19
just wondering how any of you lovely people might have tried to cut your teeth in this program?
I am stumped on what to do, to get the ball rolling and get learning. Tried importing some models from max, worked out ok but got to the point of applying a texture and couldn't figure it out. Gave up thean and haven't returned since.
would love to make a low poly character or something, any tips?
I am stumped on what to do, to get the ball rolling and get learning. Tried importing some models from max, worked out ok but got to the point of applying a texture and couldn't figure it out. Gave up thean and haven't returned since.
would love to make a low poly character or something, any tips?
Replies
The confusing thing about maya is there's often many different ways to do the same thing.
Applying your texture:
Window>rendering editor>hypershade>Create materials>lambert, double click the new material>click on the checkerbox in the colour channel>file>browse to your texture>middle mouse button drag the material onto your geometry to assign, OR with the geo selected, right click on your material in the Hyperhade>Assign material to selection.
In the viewport 4 is wireframe, 5 is shaded, 6 is textured and shaded.
Some basics:
Spacebar brings up a menu, edit polys and polys provide you with the polygon tools.
With object selected, F9=vert mode,F10=edge mode,F11=face mode ,F8= object mode.
Get used to using QWERT for your various transformation modes. Holding down SHIFT adds to or deselects a selection. That should get you at least started.
And yeah, F1 too
With the special edition of UT2004 there came a second disc with Maya PLE and video tutorials by 3d Buzz about maya´s interface, modelling and animation.
for me, it's to jump right in with the program in question and force myself to use it on a project, no chickening-out allowed. will mean a lot of tears and "in x, this works so much better"-thoughts but in the end that's the only way to really dive into it.
i admit, i get tired when reading through beginner tutorials - or even worse: watching a video of someone using that thing >his way - not mine!< while explaining the steps. have to do it myself and will never remember things until i had to dig them up a 100 times in the manual - while swearing like a madman.
Space [hold] - menus , quick tap toggles between quad view and one view (where your mouse cursor is determines what view is maxed)
Ctrl Space - It's like hitting tab in photoshop, just hides the channel box etc
Right Click - Brings up a menu for edge / vert / blah selection
Ctrl Right click - Lets you convert selections and use the edge ring / loop selection tool
Shift right click - Append to Poly tool, and Split Edge ring tool (my favourite)
1,2,3 toggles nurbs/sub div smoothness
4 and 5 switch between wire and shaded
holding down C enables edge / curve snap
holding down V enables snapping to verts
tapping g performs your last previous action.
Ctrl-Shift-click on virtually any menu option will dump it into the menu shelf, but it will always retain the same value even if you later change it - so you can have various offset values for bevelling in your shelf.
Middle mouse drag shelf items around.
Set up a shelf of menu items that you use a lot. I live with my shelf. It dramatically speeds you up. You're also able to have the same thing with different options on your shelf, which is nice. You can also add the options (lil box to the left of it in the menu) for that operation as well.
On windows it's Shift + Control and then select the operation in the menu.
btw what does F1 do? I'm on a mac and some of the keyboard shortcuts are different. If it's "help", well, there's a key on the mac labled "help" - forward thinking there!
I'm more interested in what people did to get started, thanks for the texture application advice Daz, had me stumped!
Looking for a low poly tut right now, help me to build something from the feet up.
To get started on maya I used a "learning maya" book. for maya 5 at the time.. or was it 3.. either way it walked through the tool set pretty easily and allowed me to get comfortable enough with the interface and placement of things to just go out and mess around on my own
Oh and usually I would start from the torso outwards to the limbs, not from the feet up, or was that just
Another VERY useful tool to have is the MJpoly tools, in 7 they already have it built in although it works a little differently than the plugin. I like putting it in as hotkeys so I can work faster in cutting those polys to add detail, selecting poly loops and rings helps a lot to UV map.
I heard the next gen machines can handle models of Mirza's detail level of course on 0 subdivision but still, with smooth normals, would be tough to tell a difference.
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Were veering off topic now, but just to nitpick, I actually think that it's not remotely tough at all, to tell the difference between a 20k+ poly cage model, and a subdivided version of it. There's a HUGE difference.
Besides, a cage model intended for subdivision is not a relevant reference point for a character headed for a next gen console game. You wouldn't model it in the same way at all.
Tareq's a great guy btw. Talented too.
Since you're coming from 3ds Max, this document might be useful: http://www.alias.com/eng/support/maya/knowledgebase/wp/3dmax_to_maya.pdf
It lists some common terms and keyboard shortcuts for both Maya and Max, so you can compare and see the differences.
I think Maya is very intuitive program so it might take just some patience and trying things out to get started, as opposed to digging through documentation, books or DVDs, of which there is more than plenty by now. I've started with Mastering Maya 3 book, but that one goes into all different types of things Maya can do. But for poly modeling, here's my tip: use marking menus (they are just like quad menus in Max and depend on selection).
- Right click on a model brings marking menu that lets you choose selction type (face, vertex, edge etc).
- Ctrl + right click on a model and you'll get options to manipulate selection, such as shrink, grow, convert from one to the other, select edge loops and so on.
- Shift + right click on a model and you get very useful marking menu for working with polygons. It pretty much contains all the basic tools you will need. It also depends on selection type. For example, if you have edge selected, in this marking menu you'll have soften/harden edge, bevel edge, collapse edge, flip triangle edge and so on. When you get used to using these menus and spend hours modeling, it will become a matter of gesturing with a mouse, because you'll know where each menu item is. That, or set up some shortcuts (aka hotkeys) that make sense to you.
Another thing to remember is that all the editors are neatly placed inside Window menu, and they are all navigated exactly the same way as the viewport - which is one thing I love about Maya. Also, if you can't find editor or menu item, under help, there's item "Find Menu...", so if you don't know where Extrude Face is, this thing will find it.
Hope that helps a bit.
Are you a modeler? Animator? If you're an animator, you're in the right spot. If you're a modeler, you should look around some more before jumping into Maya too quickly. I would recommend looking at modo, Wings3D, and Silo. In the end, you want to find something that you can get comfortable with and most importantly that has a FAST WORKFLOW. My conclusion from years with Maya is that it's modeling workflow sucks balls.
*holds up shield*
I'm currently learning XSI, and if I make a thread about it, the last thing I want is for someone to tell me to use another app. I *HAVE* to evaluate it for myself. So, nothing personal, but I don't think your post is remotely useful.
Do all the app. bashing you want in another thread for sure, but not in a thread in which someone is asking for HELP with that app. I actually think that could be a useful forum rule.
hawken, I can tell you that customizing marking menus is the key to a fast workflow in Maya. Also, what version of Maya are you using? We use 6.5 here, and for that, Combine and Separate are in Polygons and Edit Polygons menus respectively. That comes in handy a lot.
Also, when you are in a window you can go to Help>Help on (window/command)... That will bring up info about that command. Very useful.
Editing normals is done under Edit Polygons>Normals>. You're going to want to pay close attention to the Set User Normal checkbox in Set To Face.
Ctrl+A brings up the attribute window. That's a useful one for when you don't want it taking up all of that real estate.
I would also recommend MJPolyTools.
In the preferences, under Selection you can toggle whether or not to select the center of the face or the whole face.
Oh yeah, one last interesting thing. A lot of the times you'll come across problems and glitches with things in Maya. A good catch-all solution for that is deleting your history. This can fix a lot of things in the production environment. That's in Edit>Delete All by Type>History. Very useful.
2. Forget MJ that shit is out of date, get Maya7.
3. Turn off history it's unless you specifically need it for a tool to work.
Target Weld:
[ QUOTE ]
- if you cant see pnts on your mesh at any pnt, like if you return to the
tool via 'last tool'/y or in toolBox rather than by a targetWeld call,
simply RMB->vrts them back to visibility.
- if your on running prior to 4.5, you'll need to comment out some of
the functionality that has been added, its just below, line 59.
*/
global proc targetWeld()
{
if (!`scriptCtx -exists snapWeld`){
scriptCtx
-t "Weld Verts"
-tss 1
-fcs "vrtSnapAndWeld($Selection1)"
-esl 1
-snp " Select FIRST, singular, vtx to snap and weld to a second, of shift select for SECOND w last weld as first"
-ssp " Select SECOND, singular, vtx to snap and weld to"
-setDoneSelectionPrompt " **** ---> MORE THAN ONE PNT SELECTED FOR SNAP AND WELD, UNSELECT THESE AND TRY AGAIN <--- ****"
-sat 1
-ssc 2
-sac 1
-pv 1
-euc 0
// maya 4.5 specific additions, comment "//" out if your on 4.0 (just like this line).
-tct "edit"
-ts "$sel = `ls -sl -dag -typ mesh`; select -cl; for ($se in $sel) doMenuComponentSelection($se, \"pv\");"
// end 4.5 specific additions
snapWeld;
}
$sel = `ls -sl -dag -typ mesh`;
select -cl;
for ($se in $sel)
doMenuComponentSelection($se, "pv");
setToolTo snapWeld;
}
global proc vrtSnapAndWeld(string $sel[])
{
undo; string $fst[] = `ls -sl -fl -type float3`;
string $scnd[] = stringArrayRemove($fst, $sel);
if (size($fst) == 1){
float $p[] = `pointPosition -w $scnd`;
move -ws $p[0] $p[1] $p[2] $fst;
polyMergeVertex -d 0.0001 -ch 0 $fst $scnd;
} else {
warning " ** More than one pnt initially selected to snap and weld to, start selectn again (you may have coincident vrts) ** ";
select -cl;
setToolTo snapWeld;
}
}
[/ QUOTE ]
Detach:
[ QUOTE ]
//detachSeparate.mel v1.1
//Jeff Dobson 7/2/01
//jeffdobs@swbell.net
//
//DESCRIPTION: This script will effectively detach and separate selected faces from a poly mesh.
//Advantages of this script over Maya's built in detach/separate is that this script doesn't create
//a third parent node. It also allows you to break off only the selected faces as opposed to exploding
//every sub-mesh of an object.
//SETUP: Create a shelf button or hotkey with the command detachSeparate;
//ICON: detachSeparate.bmp
//HISTORY: 7/20/01 - v1.1 -- Changed duplicate command to -un from -rr. Fixes bug that leaves an extra
// shape node when script is run on an object with an extrude in its history.
global proc detachSeparate()
{
string $nameSplitSkip[];
string $faceNum[];
string $temp[];
string $newObj[];
string $newFaceSel[];
string $origFaceSel[] = `filterExpand -ex 1 -sm 34`;
string $origObjShape[] = `listRelatives -p $origFaceSel`;
string $origObj[] = `listRelatives -p $origObjShape`;
//Get my selected face numbers into $faceNum
for ($step = 0, $skip = 0; $step < size($origFaceSel); $step++, $skip++)
{
tokenize $origFaceSel[$step] "." $temp;
$nameSplitSkip[$skip] = $temp[0];
$skip++;
$nameSplitSkip[$skip] = $temp[1];
clear $temp;
}
for ($step2 = 0, $skip2 = 1; $step2 < (size($nameSplitSkip)/2); $step2++, $skip2 = $skip2 + 2)
{
$faceNum[$step2] = $nameSplitSkip[$skip2]; //every other value
}
//Dupe original object
$newObj = `duplicate -un $origObj[0]`;
delete -ch $newObj[0];
string $newAllFaces[] = `ls ($newObj[0] + ".f[*]")`;
//Make new array for face selection on $newObj
for ($step3 = 0; $step3 < size($faceNum); $step3++)
{
$newFaceSel[$step3] = ($newObj[0] + "." + $faceNum[$step3]);
}
//Delete original face selection
delete $origFaceSel;
//Delete inverse face selection on duplicate
select -r $newAllFaces;
select -d $newFaceSel;
delete;
select -r $newObj[0];
}
[/ QUOTE ]
1. Never use normals set to face.
2. Forget MJ that shit is out of date, get Maya7.
3. Turn off history it's unless you specifically need it for a tool to work.
[/ QUOTE ]
What.
MJ is still relevant in 7 - unless there's a way to use the Split Polygon Tool faster.
In MJ I can go ahead and select a combo of verts and edges and have MJ create a split through them all.
Also has some good tuts. I initially learned Maya with 3Dbuzz and digital tutors. I found them quite helpful.
Maya is also a bit more straight forward with its... stuff. You want a sphere--you get one. No converting it to mesh or epoly. It's just there and you can go to town. You want to apply a uv map? Click the button and it's there, no drop down, collapsing, etc. It's just there.
I like the shelves, since you'll run out of hotkeys eventually. CTRL+Clicking on a menu item will add it to the current shelf. Makes digging through all its menus a little less daunting for the beginner.
Edit: (this explaination is windows-centric) Oh, if you want to bring a texture in, have Hypershade open and your texture folder open. You can drag and drop the file out of its folder right into hypershade work area. Then if you click the faces/object you want to apply the file to, then right click the texture in hypershade and select "Apply texture/material to selected object" it will automatically create a lambert shader named after the filename. The sped things up for me a lot, and made naming materials a snap!
mainly it was the terminologies that had me stumped.
Even though some things in MAX are truely retarded, I'm used to them and finding the same thing as a different name in MAYA, like "wtf is lambert, where is my gray diffuse ball?" takes patience of a saint!
I don't think I'll be installing scripts just yet, but thanks anyway guys.
I've decided that given this oportunity to actually have Maya on the Mac, I should make the most of it. The preverbial shoe needs to be put on the other foot to see if it fits, and if it doesn't, I have to make it fit!
When i learned a few years back, the biggest habbit I had to kick off was the placement of my left hand when I used Max. I had my fingers on V (rotate viewport) Z (zoom) and spacebar (pan). I also had to get rid of using the right-click menu to select my manipulation tools.
While Maya's spacebar menu puts everything you need right infront of you, I found it to be far too confusing and convoluted. So I grew to become more of a hotkey/shelf menu user.
As a new user, I think it'll help you learn faster if you avoided the Hypershade. Unless you're making complex network shaders/commands, there's no need to use it.
The multilister is far more user friendly and easy to understand. It's very similar to Max's Material Editor, too.