5 MORE Maya Tips You NEED To Know!

hey everyone what's up and welcome back to how to become an animator I'm sorry and today we're doing another Mya five tips that you should know this topic was voted for over on patreon or do our video voting every month and you guys picked the topic so here we are we're gonna talk about five more tips in Maya and if you haven't seen the last video you definitely check that out because it's got some really good stuff in there and if you're trying to get a job or an internship this summer this fall someone the next year every workshop going on right now which you guys over on Twitch helped me design this wonderful poster we took it from this to this much much better thank you for that and this is for me to help you with resumes cover letters and just general application stuff so the link is in the description go check that out and beyond that or did you go so the first tip in today's video is actually the first thing that I wish I had ever learned in Maya ever aside from like how to use the software called set your project if you've ever been in a situation where you're animating you're doing great work and you decide alright time to play blasts so you go up to playback you go to play blast use your option box and you pick whatever you gonna do and you make sure to hit save to file because you want to actually export a file and you want to upload it for review whatever you go ahead and hit the button thinking that it's gonna end up in the same kind of area and root file directory system as the Maya file that you're currently working in but that doesn't happen it doesn't show up there it's like somewhere else in your computer and you have to dig and it's almost always by the way like if you have this problem here's where it usually lives then almost always goes to documents Maya or if you're on a Mac it's the based on the same thing My Documents Maya projects default movies I don't have anything here right now because I haven't hit the button but that's where everything wants to go by default you can change this and you should change this every time you do a new shot it's called setting your project so let's just go ahead and do it you open a new - scene the first thing you should do before anything you should go to file project window you hit new you then give it a name and you say current project we're gonna call this Maya tips video you then go to the location and you hit the little file browser icon pick a place you want to be and you hit accept the next thing to do is to go to file set project now that you've created that location you've kind of specified it you hit set project you go into the Maya tips video or the equivalent of whatever folder you just made you come here and you say set what you've just done is you told Maya that everything it's now doing lives in kind of that area but it's going to allow you to do is when you go to save something so have a cube it looks great let's go ahead and just save it is gonna default when you save a new file to the correct location is gonna say Maya tips video / scenes that's where you want it to be and normally it's you open the save as window and you have to go navigate every time back to this area to save your file it never wants to go here by default so I call this sphere I'll set a couple keys I'll just make a play blast really quickly and now if I need to go find that file know exactly where it is everything that Maya will do from now on will live inside of Maya tips video and this is actually extremely important if you're gonna work in x-gen hair cloth simulation if you're gonna be exporting caches of geometry or Alembic stuff it's going to want to work with different files in an environment that it understands and so this is how you tell it what that environment is this is an absolutely essential tool don't forget it try to get in the habit of making it every time you do a new shot wanna make sure you come back in file project window set project go from there tip number two this is called the 2d camera pan technique and this is actually really really useful I wish I'd known about this earlier so what this is is when you are working with a shot cam so say you have here on my left I have a camera window which has a locked up camera I'm not gonna move it that's the camera that I'm gonna render from or playblast from or whatever on the right this is where I'm doing all my changes so if I'm so if I'm animating I'm doing it all on the right and I'm always constantly looking at the left to see how does this actually look in the final output now in some cases you may want to make your window your bigger and you want to like you know get in here and do a lot of good stuff and it's really hard to see what you're doing on the other window and it doesn't matter if the panel is like torn off and it's just like floating around because you can have just like a standalone window and do like this kind of a thing it really doesn't matter how you have your layout set up the benefit of this tool is that if you need to zoom in on your camera window if you need to say like alright I can see the character from the cameras point of view but I need to see it better I need to like get in and see like how is the fingers or the silhouettes reading kind of their tangent if you need to get in there you may think like I'll just try to like making a camera and like just but you're gonna get a different perspective than the actual camera it's like the difference between zooming on a camera or it's actually changing focal lengths or physically moving forward to zoom and you're getting a different perspective first is like pinching in on an image if you want just pinch in on the image and make it bigger at the exact same everything just bigger size here's what you do when normally you hold alt or option on a Mac or whatever and then you right mouse click and drag to zoom in on an image so what you do is notice at the very bottom this window says camera 1 that's the camera that I'm currently using the other one says perspective doesn't matter I'm gonna hold down the back slash button which is the button above Enter or return and under the backspace or delete key I'm gonna hold that down right mouse click and drag and it's going to start zooming in now what it says at the bottom it says 2d pan and zoom camera ones are still in this camera but I'm now panning into the image and I can zoom in it as close as I want and you can see that it's just bumping up the resolution I can see the face a lot better and I can use the middle mouse and the right Mouse and I'm just holding down the back slash as I do all this so it's just moving that little viewfinder and we're just manipulating the actual viewfinder we're not changing the cameras perspective so you can zoom in on the hand you can zoom in on the face you can do whatever you need to do and when you're done with it you just tap that backslash key again and it goes back to the default view you can tap again and it'll take you to where you were so you can easily toggle in and out and if you combine this with the book box thing from my last Maya tips video you can actually zoom in on a certain area right click on this bookmarks tab and you can say create 2d bookmark I'm gonna go ahead and move this over to the hand and do another one create 2d bookmark and so now you've saved different bookmarks so you can easily just jump back to areas of your character if you're focusing on the face and the hand if you're doing like the feet and you're looking from the cameras point of view you can save all these things you can assign these two buttons on your shelves you can have hotkeys for them so you can easily just jump around your view and you're not always fighting like how much screen space you have on whatever monitor you're using so that is the 2d camera pan tool and it's gonna be really really helpful to making sure everything looks good the camera even if the cameras far away from the subject tip number 3 is hidden input now some of you might know this if you're like really into modeling you probably have found this one but for a lot of people this is new information if you create a shape anywhere in Maya generally what you have over here on the right if you are in the attribute editor or the channel box is you have these you know translations and rotations and scales and the stuff that we're used to you know you can move these around and whatever and most of us know that if you wanted to take for example a cylinder and you wanted to make like a pill shape out of it maybe you're making a music video I've done this I've taken a cylinder I needed to make a pill out of it so what you would normally do is you think okay well let's scale it up and then you gotta add some vertices and you got to do some you know edge loops different things to model it into a capsule however what not a lot of people have realized is that over here on the right you have this little thing called inputs poly cylinder one or whatever shape if you happen to have a sphere or a cube or whatever I'll just throw a couple shapes in the mix and each one of these has an input now this is just a hidden node system inside of Maya so if you click on inputs polyster one or the sphere you have to get more options you have to change the radius of the sphere which seems like scale but it's keeping your scale value still locked at one more importantly it allows you to add and take away subdivisions from the shape you can do this with every shape and some of them have specialty options so a poly cylinder one you have radius you have height you have your subdivisions in different axes you can make it really smooth around the edges make it more of a stop sign kind of a thing it's tough set is eight more subdivisions on the side so just in the middle and there's even an option for round cap which basically rounds off the cap exactly as you'd expect and by default if you turn on round cap nothing really happens as you turn up the subdivisions you'll see that you start to get the smooth look and so now you've just modeled a pill very quickly very easily and accents very blocky so again I'll just subdivisions and there you go we've just created a pill with no modeling necessary it's just the options built into the shapes this is going to end up being a really big deal for you and just a minute want to show you another tip so hang in there this is gonna get way cooler tip number four is display layers you might already know about this one but you might not I use this constantly in everything I animate always there's never time I don't use display layers so the thing here is usually you might have a lot of stuff in your scene in this case I have you know the character model I have some reference in the background and then I have this background that I've created and what it is but this background now this it probably happened to you where you are working and you're dragged selecting like alright I want to grab all the arm controls you accidentally grabbed stuff behind the character things like the the environment the geometry in the background that kind of thing if you don't want this to happen which usually you don't what you can do is you can set these things in their own little layer that you don't mess with so basically what I mean by that is I'm gonna grab all of my background elements so all this geometry I'm gonna come down here to the bottom right where says display layers I'm gonna say create layer from selected that creates a little layer called layer one I can double click on it I can rename it I always just call it background and I'll just leave it all alone for now and hit save now at first this does nothing I can still do everything the same but there's three little options here there's a V a P and an empty box so if I hit the V button that's visibility that will turn on and off the visibility of certain objects Maya will actually move faster if you don't have stuff loaded even if it's there it's just not calculated so this can speed up your Maya workflow if you're on a laptop by just hiding things that you don't need right now the next one is P if you're in I think 20 18 or 19 Maya or higher P is for playback so that means it is visible when you are scrubbing or if you have hit the play button or your play blasting so if I turn that off and I start scrubbing you'll see that it actually disappears and that'll show up if I play blast that stuff won't render that'll be good for those controls on him we'll do that in a second the last one is this blank box which if you hit it it toggles through T for template and R for reference and then back to normal so T for template just shows you like where things are but it won't load the shading of them so again that can speed you up but if you want to see the objects you can hit R they're still there like normal but now I can't grab them they're just references in the scene you can't actually do anything with them which is great because now I can drag freely and I don't worry about grabbing them by accident I need to get them and just turn off the AR and do my work and I do the same thing for my reference planes I always put them in their own layer so I can turn them on and off and I can hide them if I don't want them there I can put my props in there I have my utensils that can disappear and so now I'll just grab all these control curves right here I'll say layers create layer from selected I'll give it a name and I'll just say curves and I can just say hi it on playback so now I just go about my work but when I go ahead and scrub it takes the curves away it makes it a lot easier to see what I'm looking at and then I don't have to worry about clicking anything I just go back to work putting things in display layers can be a huge time-saver and just save you a lot of headache of like accidentally grabbing the wrong things and you can hide things from yourself now tip number five is one that really encompasses a lot of different things in Maya so this is gonna be a really big one if you want to do some modeling but maybe you're not a super great modeler or even if you are a modeler you may not know about this goes into surfacing it goes into lighting like this will you'll find this throughout the entire program it's one of those little things you just find after a while so hidden menus that's basically the tip what I want to say with hidden menus is that Maya actually has a ton of like things hidden inside of it that you don't know where there that can be really really useful especially when you're starting out so for example earlier I showed you how you can take a sphere spheres going a Taurus this doughnut shape right here you could hit the inputs poly torus one and it has this it's kind of like a hidden menu but this isn't what I mean what I'm gonna do with this I'm gonna up the radius and the section radius up the subdivisions I'm gonna three my smooth it out so we have this cool shape this would be kind of a pain to model without knowing that those tools are there but this goes way beyond so hidden menus are anytime you see in Maya these little arrows off in the corner of things in the same way that all of these things in the menus up top have option boxes to customize the way they work you also have this for a lot of the things in the shelves so for example you have your sphere your cube your cylinders and etc if I go to this shape which is a platonic solid it's just like this funky-looking thing it has its own you know options that we can mess with but I don't care about any of that it has a little arrow in the bottom right corner of the icon and if you mouse over it you can see it says right click for more polygons primitive types no one ever tries that right click it and suddenly you've just opened yourself up to all these different kinds of modeling things for example you can very easily make a gear which is kind of cool you can you can change how many sides around the gear you can up the radius of it there's the internal radius of how how you want it to look you've got spacing if you want to make it more flowery more sharp there's all these little things in here you can even get these crazy like twist effects but anyway this is just something that no one ever plays with you never realize that you can right click and suddenly make a helix and then get some kind of cool DNA coil thing and you could make rope really quickly really easily without having to do a whole lot of work we can even do that round cap that we saw earlier just make sure you up the subdivision cap so that you actually get around caps so that's part a of hidden menus is that there's tons of shapes and like crazy things is like ultra shapes and spherical harmonics like whatever but anytime you see those little corner arrows that means there's something there and this will go as far as even surfacing so if I just assign a material to this swirly thing I guess I don't know and I'll go to an Arnold standard surface a lot of people want to do texturing but don't know where to start well if you make a material we'll just call this a swirly material so I do have a video that you can watch on like how to do this kind of stuff how to actually do some textures the basics of texturing new to the color and you can make it specular and different roughness and values and things like that to render it or there are hidden menus when you notice this little asterisk this is the equivalent if you're in the attribute editor it may not be a little arrow in the corner might be a little star if you click presets there's actually a ton of different things in here different materials that are already made for you so I'll just start the rendering process and if you don't know what I just did you can just check out the other video I talked about it all here but if I don't to make the textures I think it's go to presets and say I don't know balloon replace and it'll make it into a balloon rubbery type of texture I can turn it into brushed metal and then it becomes brush metal so you have all these little menus hidden inside of Maya and all these different areas if I can make this into frosted glass and now we have frosted glass and that would take kind of a while to figure out if you aren't very good at this stuff so anyway you get the idea look for the arrows or the asterisks just look for things to click on and start experimenting with the tool you're not gonna break anything and you can always reset your preferences if you do so that's my last little tip is to start clicking around and exploring the options that this tool is hiding from you because there's cool stuff in there to be had if you like these tips don't forget that the thumbs up button say that you liked this video family makes a difference if you really liked it don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and if you really really like this video I do a lot of this type of stuff over on patreon the link is down below if you want to be a part more live streams where I talk about this kind of stuff show you more tips show you more stuff under the hood of Maya and so on things like that reminder if you haven't signed up for the giveaway or if you haven't signed up for the workshop if there's a limited spot so jump on that while you can but thanks so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it I hope these tips are helpful leave a comment below and let me know what you thought and if you have any other tips for everyone else down in the comment for people to discuss and share you don't share it over on discord balloon show down there thanks again and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 38,843

Keywords: maya animation tips, maya animation tricks, animation tips, animation tips and tricks, 5 maya tips, 5 more maya tips, animation tips maya, maya layers, maya set project, maya 2d camera, maya modeling tips, maya animation presets, animation pro tips, animation live stream, animation industry jobs, animation studio jobs, how to animate in maya, how to cheat in maya, easy animation software, best maya tools, maya animation tools, maya animation plugins, maya animation, maya

Id: pnm6GN00VpE

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019