Introduction to Maya - 1 Hour Quick Start Guide

hey this is Henning from flip normals in this tutorial we are going to be covering the basics of Maya we assume that you have some knowledge of 3d beforehand but that you are completely fresh 2-mile before that make sure to check out our full introduction to Maya serious this is a 12 hour series where we cover everything you need to know about really the entire software we cover modeling shading using Arnold x-gen all of that we go through how to make this full image from scratch from all the modeling shading the groom the lighting and we also cover how to use really all the features you need so make sure to check that out link in the description this is what mine is gonna look like the first time you open her up and the very first thing you're gonna be seeing is this big beautiful 3d workspace so this is where we'll start out navigation is quite simple we rotate by using alt and left mouse button we zoom by Alt + right mouse button or we can use the scroll wheel on the mouse and we pan by Alt + middle mouse button I'm personally using a tablet in this tutorial and I keep switching between that's habit and a mouse quite often but this is totally up to your personal preference if we have an item we can now hit the F key to frame it and we can go into different ortho views by holding down the spacebar and now we get up this hotbox if you were to click and hold on Maya you see this in the middle and now we can go to the right - you do it again top view and go to the front view go back to perspective view and it would even make a new camera right here when the first thing we have talked about is what is a project normally you let's assume that a project is your entire project in the colloquial sense it's all the texture maps and all your models and all that in mind this is a bit different project in Maya is a very specific way Maya deals with files and we can set the project by going under file set project and now we can choose a directory for this but default this is going to be under your Hugh's directory documents my and projects at least if you are on Windows so now we can create a new older in this directory hold this intro to Maya and we can make put it here go into the folder can it's set and now we just create a new default workspace and now if we were to go to this location you can see that we have a new folder and we go in here we have a workspace file so what we have to do is we have to go to file and project window on the bottom and then we just need to hit accept now you can see that we're going to get all these different folders created and this is where it's gonna put everything so hit accept and if we have refresh now and now you see we have all of these the reason we're talking about this so early is because this is really essential your scenes will go under scenes all your render data will go into one folder all your action files will go into one folder it was really important to know that now the next thing we will talk about is saving this is relating to the project as well if we go to file and save it's now gonna just bring us up to the last place we saved which was the default project but now you can see here to the left we held or have all the different areas we can save into but default and you see current project entered mile and we can go under scenes and now we can just save our project and now we can just save our file we have two kinds of files we have my binary and my ASCII my ASCII allows you to actually open up the file in text editor but it's a bit slower to use and my binary is a bit faster to use but it doesn't allow you to open up in a text editor so I prefer to save this as a my ASCII file and then we can call this intro or one and then we said save and then we now are seen it's been saved down here you can see that we it's printing out the result of what just happened so if we were to now just create a new cube when your cylinder whatever is it's going to be printing everything so whatever it is we're doing it will print it down here let's talk about ultra saving as well Maya can be a bit how do we put this bit crashy sometimes it's a generally pretty good surfer but it does just tend to crash a fair bit so we are gonna have to talk about all to save right away we find autosave settings under windows settings preferences preferences under settings and now we have a whole tab of different things and then it's gonna be under files and projects and then autosave now you don't have to set this to twenty ten minutes maybe something like thirty is better but in general I highly recommend that you actually have this enabled it's going to go under the autosave directory under your project as well so you can define this just go under your project and over to save a little tips well while we're in this exact settings menu is if we scroll down a little bit maybe save our file dialog and by default it's gonna be using the Maya native which meaning that it's going to be using this one but we can also switch this to OS native so if we narrow to just save this and we go to file and save as now you can see it's actually I'm using the OS file browser just in the windows file browser so this is just a bit more intuitive at least for me but you know up to you so here's a mine scene I've created this is this is one of the scenes we use in a full interest series and it has a few different elements and that's for models you can see one cousin has a transparent shader and it has a bunch of different things what we need to do now is we need to talk about the outliner we can find the outliner to the left you see here this icon here and we have the outliner and this is really a quick way of getting an overview of everything in your scene you can see now we have the different groups or the different objects named groups and we're gonna rename these so we can do this by double clicking on our on the object and then we call this model or one and we can do the same from the other guys if you want to know - and then we can group all of them by selecting them all select one select the other by holding down shift and then we can hit ctrl G ctrl G is going to group them all so now now we create a new group and I will call this statue models if we want to parent this under another group we can very easily do this we can hold down the middle mouse button and we can just drag this up and then we can put this under the model group if we want to take it out of the model group we can just middle mouse button and drag it out to one the other areas and if we want to do this without dragging we can hold that we can hold on a Shift key and hit the P key so shift P and this is gonna unparent it so very easy to just start repairing things like this this means that now if you want to move all the models we can now just select the group and we can you move all of the models we can also hide something as well we can do this by hitting the H key so now we can hide in this entire group we can hit H again to unhide it we also have a little secret which is that we have a double outliner so we see in the bottom we have some dotted lines and we can just drag on this and this gives us a double outliner now this isn't handy for a simple scene like this but it's really handy if you're working with a complex scene and you have thousands of objects now you can you can really go deep into one and you can just go from one to the other because these are independent of each other in terms of where are you looking so you can have one open here and you can have one open here and you can just drag from one to the other another thing as well is that if you want to open up the entire hierarchy let's say this model here you can now this model group we can now shift click on the plus sign and this opens up the entire hierarchies now everything is exposed which is really useful a little bonus as well we can also go under display and these select tag objects only and I can see this goes crazy and you might have experienced this yourself where suddenly you're seeing so much crap if you're seeing you have no idea what's going on well this is because Maya is node based and this is a connection of all different nodes in your scene so this is a really handy way of actually seeing what's going on so this is where this will be all your materials you can see here we have like a Blin and we have different materials down here so it's a really handy way of selecting everything in your scene so we can disable this but going to display and AG objects only so we briefly alluded to the fact that Maya is node based and we'll show you an example of this first let's just hide our Statue models we can select the group and hit the H key and then we're gonna be creating Cuba don't worry about what I'm specifically doing right away because we will cover all of this in a second this is more just to show you a concept we will use a feature called a node editor go to window and here we have the node editor just click on this and now you can see all the nodes now we can drag this down and dock it to the bottom here just by dragging it down and you can see this blue line now just do release when it's on top of the blue line and here you can see the node editor and then we can click on the input and output right here and I can see everything connected to this node so we have a few different nodes first off this is the one we can use to actually change the segments so now you can see that we can change the segments on and off this is this means that you can keep changing the segments even after you created the model which you can't do in another software so if you own some other software at least so if you've selected something else you can still go back and you can change the amount of segments you can also have you also have the shape node the shape node shows how it's drawn and it shows this wireframe is it smooth all the different attributes you have regarding how it's actually drawn in a viewport the next up we have the transform node the transfer node determines word is in space then what we can do we can assign a material to this right mouse button assigned favorite material and we can assign a bling turd and I can see we have assigned a Blinn material to this so we have we have the material right here and this is where we can actually change the color of it now this is known how I actually work day to day what my point is that this is how Maya displays data under the hood and this becomes really important for everything you're doing remember all the things we saw under the outliner this is where we can see all of them so we can now for instance which means we can find blend three in doublet here and we can just search for blend three and it's going to be right there so we can we have all the nodes if we were to now extrude something again don't worry about how I'm doing this we'll talk about this in a second now we have the name for the extrusion here and you can find this we search for it so even an extrusion is a node now this is both awesome and it's terrible and we'll get into that in a second whites but for now just know that stuff is connected via nodes and this becomes really important so next up we look at two interface items which are very much connected to nodes we have the attribute editor right here then we have a channel box right here you can toggle between these two by hitting ctrl + a so the channel box is really one of the most basic ones that's what we click on the object and here you can see all the different channels so this is a transform and here we have you can see the inputs as well here we have the extrusion and then scroll down a little bit here we have the initial the initial segments of the object then we can switch to the attribute editor which is done by controlling a now I had a really hard time with the attribute editor in the beginning before interested nodes and this is really reason why we talked about notes because if without it you wouldn't understand what these are but now you can see that these correspond perfectly we have PQ 1 which is the transform node which is right here then we have P cube shape which is the actual shape node and and so you can see that we have a lot of different options for them so under here we have a bunch of different options for each one of them and we're not gonna be covering these these this would take a crazy amount of time but the point is that they are here that we have the extrusion which is has all sorts different options so if we want to change something like the thickness the divisions whatever it might be we can do that then we have the the actual original construction the original creation node as well so we can change all of the these things like the scale and all that of it and then we have the shader so this corresponds perfectly to all different nodes we have attached to our object so if you're wondering what this all these things are well they're just notes being attached it's just a way of displaying the notes so let's just kill the node editor and let's move on to some modeling the way I prefer to work is using something called marking menus marking menus is an awesome tool and have a lot of power with this system instead of going through every single shelf and every single menu item to do something you can simply select an object and you can use the marking menus for it so if you want to create an object you can hit shift right mouse button and then we get up creation menus so now you can create a cone real quick if you want to do general things to it you can right mouse button and now you can see that we have general attributes and the general selection tools whatever it might be and we also have component modes so this is right mouse button we can now select a vert just like the face we can select the object to go back into the object is just by right mouse button and just selecting them where they are there you can go into your component mode by right mouse button selecting your face and now if we hold a control right mouse button we get selection tools and if you hold down shift right mouse button we get general modeling tools now this looks a bit confusing in the beginning but this is really one of the most powerful ways of working in Maya and we're gonna be using this throughout this entire series so in short that's right mouse button for general properties and general for changing component mode once we're in a component mode once for any component we can shift right mouse button and this gives us modeling tools and we can control right mouse button it's something selected to give us selection tools if you want to move something around we can easily do that with the move tool which you can find over here to our left we can do is just by moving this around like so you see we have the gizmo we can also cheat we can also use the hotkey W to go into the move tool then we have rotation which you can find over here and then we can just start to rotate this around we can also say the e key for rotation then we can scale by hitting the R key or going over here and then we can just start to scale stuff up like this we can also scale of individual axis like so or we can scale it on two axes by by clicking on this square between the two so this is W for move efore rotate and R for scale if you were in rotation as well there's a little nifty tip that is that you can do incremental rotation so if you hold on the J key now it's going to rotate every 15 degrees by default like so so it's a really handy way of rotating so hold on J and just move it around like so you can also find a lot of settings for them by double picking on the tool and then you have a lot of settings here for each different tool we aren't gonna be we aren't really gonna be covering this too much right away but a bunch of different useful stuff what we can do as well is let's just move this guy up a little bit we can D we can change between world and local we can do this by going to access orientation and then we can set this to object and we can set this to world you can see the differences the world is gonna move based on world space and object it's going to move it based on your objects pace so you can just move it up and down like so you can also hold on the W key to switch between these two now you can see we have a object which is an object mode and a world which make takes it out to world mode the most basic way of selecting is by being an object mode just right mouse button an object mode and then we just click on what we want to have selected just left mouse button if you want to select multiple we can hold down the shift key and we can select multiple things if we deselect we just hold on the shift key M we'll just deselect it if you want to select the opposite we can now shift and drag on top now you can see we get this rectangle now we're gonna shift and drag on top and now we can select the opposite so this just inverts the selection shift and right if we want to select a loop we can go in select the object right mouse button to go on and in face mode and now we can select one poly just by its left mouse button on it just protect me on it and then we can hold on the shift key and we can just double click on the loop we want so select first one then select the next one unlike some software it doesn't matter where you select on the polygon you just select the first then select the next one if we are in edge mode just right mouse button edge we can just double click on an edge to select an edge loop and we can select multiple by hold on the shift key and is collecting like so and we can remove from the selection by holding down the control key and double clicking on it or we can just click on it but control double click actually removes the entire edge loop if we want to do a range select meaning want to select from here to here we can select the first one hold down the shift key and shift double click to select a range like so this works with polygons as well select this face hold on shift and double click and it selects the entire range if you want to go back into object mode we can right mouse button and go into object mode and now we're in object mode one issue is that sometimes it's a bit difficult to actually see what's going on or we have to access a specific modeling tool and just have to deselect everything so what you can do is you could of course just ctrl click on the model but you can also hit the Alt key key all DD selects everything which is really useful if you have a bunch of things selected and you just want D selected alt d' d selects everything if you want to grow and shrink our selection we can do that select click on the model faces right mouse button your faces and then we can use the selection marking menu control right mouse button and then we can you grow selection and this grow and then we can use a key we haven't talked about before which is a D key the G key is for repeat last action so if we just hit the G key it's just going to repeat what we just did we can hold a control or right mouse button and shrink the selection and then we can just shrink the selection and then we hit G key again to reduce the selection we can also use shift and greater than and less than to actually grow and shrink the selection but that only works if you have proper international keyboard like if I used to use in a region keyboard and you didn't actually have these very easily available so I prefer to just use ctrl row selection and grow and control grow select shrink selection and shrink selection just use the G key to repeat the last action we can also isolate our object by hitting ctrl one I can see this item up here has been enabled this is a UI item so control one will toggle on isolation and we'll now we can only see this single object I can click around and you can do all sorts of things to it and if we control one again it's back to normal we can also hide it by selecting the object and just simply H key and then we can shift H to bring it back I prefer to isolate it because that's less destructive because there's an actual mode we go into and doesn't really it doesn't actually change anything it doesn't change the render ability or anything off it now let's look into the modeling tools the first tool we look into is how to smooth the model or to go into subdivision services do this by hitting the 1 2 & 3 key one is just regular polygons 2 is subdivided with a cage and 3 is just with raw polygons so now we can just recently go between 1 & 3 really useful would you duplicate our model by hitting ctrl D and this duplicates the model like you can see movies move around we can delete a model by hitting the Delete key we can also duplicate a model by holding down the shift key and this cloning TVC now just moving it around like this actually clones the model it is really useful we can change the behavior from clone from duplication to instancing if you double click on the tool setting and will go all the way down to the bottom and now we can change this with clone to instance we can just select both of these just select one select the other and hit the Delete key just to get rid of them again we can also extrude by holding down right mouse button go into face mode and then we can hold down the shift key and just move it out like so and now we can extrude in this way we can also use the more traditional way of doing it which is shift right mouse button and like we mentioned before this gives us all the modeling tools and then extrude faces shift right mouse button is going to give you really all the modeling tools you ever need so extrude faces and there we go and now you can see we get this gizmo now we can just drag on the blue handle and then we can just move this out like so you can hit G key to repeat it and I can see we get another exertion if you want to merge some polygons together or merge subverts together rather then we can go into vertex select one vertex select the other vertex despite shift select one shift clicking the other then shift right mouse button merge verts and merge verts to Center this will just merge at the center we can also just hit G key now when we just done done this and this will just repeat the last action what's also handy is that you're fast for marking menus and be confident where they are you can just do this which means that you can just quickly just move up so what I'm doing now is I'm selecting once other and then merge verts and merge verse to Center but instead of actually going up and then going up again I'm just doing this one operation so what I'm doing now shift right mouse button and we're just dragging up so like this and this just means this incredibly fast actually used modeling tools same here as well now I'm just switching between vertex and shin polygons and object mode because I know where they are vertex edge polygon and object mode so this big this becomes second-nature we can go into face and do the same with extrude as well shift right mouse button and go down but I can do this in one operation this could be like this and then we can just do it this is one of the reasons why mine is actually a really fast modeler because you can just easily and get access to all these tools so quickly whatever so if you want to go from extruding like this extrude to actually merging you can just practice button verts like this and then just merge them together this just takes some time to get into your into your fingers but once it's there it's gonna really speed up your work your modeling work you can also use a tool called multi cut which I use a lot let's just go into object mode right mouse button object mode then we can shift right mouse button and multi cut and we can now enable this and we can just start cutting so we can just start to cut where we want our cuts to be and then we can right mouse button to commit to the cut we can also use this tool to add loops as well control will if hold on control while using it will give us this really nice loop cut in the middle so this is really the way I'm adding loops I'm this control thinking well with the multi cut and then I'm changing the loop to by just clicking and dragging like so you can just click and drag just to drag an edge or you can just click where you want to go and then right mouse button to commit if you have a hole in the model like so we have a hole here and we can create a hole by signal polygon delete and you want to fill this hole we can now go to edge select the actual edge right mouse button and then we're going to fill hole now in this case you just filled in what a quad but what if we have a bigger hole like so we can right mouse button go to the edge again and then we can fill hole and I can see it just fills in the hole and now we can use the multi control to just connect these guys up so it's really nice and handy using fill hole and multi card together like this if we have multiple objects like we have here where we have the head now and we have the the rest of the face we can combine these two by shift clicking on them to select both of them shift right mouse button and then we can go down and hit combine and this combines it like so then we can in order to separate it we can notice it's combined to one in order to separate it we can shift right mouse button and then we can separate and this now puts every single piece unique piece into its own model and now you can go in here under the outside and now we can just see all different ones we can also subdivide the model as well like the actual polygons we can select the model shift right mouse button and then we can set this to smooth smoothing actually adds more polygons to it this is not similar to hitting three this actually adds polygons to our model so now you can see this increase the poly count by four and now we can just change the divisions here which keeps just going crazy with it so let's just undo this if you want to bevel something we can easily do that as well if we can select an edge like so we can just select one edge shift double click to select the other one we can bevel by hitting cut for B and this just makes us a nice little bevel now I'm using ctrl + middle mouse button to change the fraction you can see here this just changes a fraction then we can also change the segment's as well like so we can also use this with shift right mouse button and bevel edges like so this is the exact same to me then we can slide the edges as well so if we want to slide these edges down a little bit we can shift right mouse button and then we can use a slide edges tool and then we're going to slide them up like and then if we want to delete the edges you could hit ctrl + backspace and that I should leads to perfectly fine but that's a bit lengthy from your arm to travel you actually have to move your right your right hand off the tablet or a mouse so what I prefer to do is I prefer to use shift right mouse button and delete edge and this will delete the edge so this just looks like this when I'm just working like so shift our mouse button just deleting them next up we just have to talk about a concept well called history this is similar to to what we talked about in terms of nodes what you see now is if we control a to go into the channel channel box you see we have a lot of inputs now this just means that we have added a lot of nodes to our actual model and this is awesome because we can now change them but it's also terrible because we don't want to change them this is just direct modeling we're not doing any kind of procedural modeling here so we really don't want to change this ever again so what we can do we can delete our history and this is also our mind gets very crashes sometimes because you haven't delete a history for like two days this should become very long so we can do this if we go to edit delete by type and then we can delete history you can also see the hot key here is alt shift + D that's what I prefer to do so alt shift D this is just in my fingers so I just do this a lot and this just deletes the history let's just delete this and let's look into how we can move the pivot so I want to create a cube now shift right mouse button and cube and then I just want to move this up just a little bit like so so now you can see that we have the pivot right here we can also move it we hold on D key we can now move the pivot and we can also snap it if we were to now and just click on where we want to go so you can snap to a point you can snap it to a polygon you can snap it to an edge so this is really useful because now we can stamp to this edge here and now we can rotate it using the e key and now we can you see you can see we can start rotating like so what I use this for quite often is if I'm in a situation like this and I want to move for instance this edge up like so I want to move this in this exact direction is this edge hiris could of course just do it like this but that's very inaccurate so what I can do I can hold on to D key and I can just click on this edge and I can see I can just move this perfectly up and down like so so this gives you a lot of control so moving the pivot around is really easy and really powerful so hold on the D key and just click where you want to go and if you now want to reset it you can go to modify center pivot and this just we centers to pivot let's look into them to form reverse as well hide the cube or actually let's delete the cube and then we can use to the former's so we're looking to the bend deformer first this is we go way more in-depth and listen to if in the full series but let's just take a quick peek into the former's we can access the former's if we go all the way in top here and now you can see we have the form and we can access the benda former if we go to non-linear and then bend and then you see we have the curvature has been exposed now under the Ben deform or under input now we can start to set the strenght amount I'm just using the middle mouse button to actually change this value you could of course go in and just start to type in numbers as well I just I just prefer to just select the curvature amount and then just middle mouse button dragging like so if you want more control you can also hold a control and middle mouse button now it's a lot slower and you have a lot more control so now we can use this to create some like a nice little arc so instead of modeling this perfectly flat we can now just have a bend modifier and just bend this down we can also create it set at 180 degrees which Crace is like well or something like that we can delete history on this if we want to make this not editable so shift alt e' and i can see this disappears and now this has now been baked into it so all the transformation or all all the deformation has now been baked into it next we look into the twist deformer we can access this by going under deform nonlinear and twist and this is something very similar to the bend just that it twists so what this does is this will just twist the model so now we can create this really nice twisted feel like so let's just select both of these and move them up you see what's going on then we can just twist it and you can just see what happens now so a twist deformer is super useful and then we look into one of my favorite deformers which is the lattice I will go back to our trusted little or character and if we now go to the form lattice we can now see that we get this this shape around it and if we now right mouse button while this is selected we can go to the lattice point select one of the points like so now we can just start to move it around and now you can see that this just creates a really nice just real nice deformation and we can now see that this point is way off so what we can do we can just go to the move tool and just add Arisa tool and then we can just select it again like so so now we can just use the lattice to really just change the design of this quite quickly so this is just a really handy way of just changing up your model it doesn't have to be a character like this where you can change the character side it also be a car which you just have to bash up or something like that so the lattice super useful we can just delete lattice now and I can see it's gonna pop right back to where it was this is really under antigen Maya that money is very non-destructive when it wants to me ton destructive if you were dealing with the former's it's really a pleasure to work with like this then we'll again do some quick animation if we we have a quick sphere which this is gonna be some pretty pretty quick animation trust me or not because your workspace from Maya classic to animation now you can see the entire works because actually changes and we're in a camera view we can just hit the F key now to change this to be centered and now you can see we can change the frames we can also change them down here as well we can see these are the currently visible frames so we can now change this as well just dragging this left to right and now we're at the maximum frames so frame 1 to 200 we can also change the amount of total frames but going to go in here and set this to 250 maybe said we get more frames in this 150 and I would get less frames and we just scrub here to change the actual what actual frame were at if you want to actually set a key this is very easy to do you insert a key by going to the frame you want to let's in this case it's the frame one right mouse button on the channel you want to effect in this case we're just gonna move this on channel one first just to see which one actually is then this is the x-axis right click on it she's selected now you can see this is now red move this to another frame which you want to go to let's say frame hundred and I've moved it like so then right mouse button again and key selected and now you can see that we have keys you can navigate in the graph editor by zooming in and out by the same way you navigate in the viewport Alt alt right mouse button to go in and out and all right mouse button to pan around like so as well so now you can see we have two keys and if we now work this scrub between these two you can now see the we get animation you can also use hotkey Alt + V to activate this now you can see that this is crazy fast and this because this actually produce prey place it not in real time what's fastest can so now what should be around four seconds is played in like one second so what we can do we can go down here to little running man who looks like he's being chased by a cog click on that and then we can change this the playback speed from play every frame to play 24 fps so it's safe now if we hit all three now you can see that it is much slower so now this guy should gonna try to play this in real time so now this is incredibly important because otherwise you not gonna be able to see your animation we can also change tangents as well currently you can see that this goes from this is a really soft tangent we can select both of these and go to tangents and we can set this to be linear now is just gonna be a linear speed between the two is going to go with a completely linear speed we can change it back to auto we can also just select them hit D key which will do the same thing you can also play down here as well ain't gonna play backwards as well if you want to if you want to delete a keyframe you can easily do that as well you can select the keyframe and then you should pleat all what we can do we can plead leader in the channel editor as well the channel box right click on it and then just hit delete selected and this deletes the selected keys on it so but my preferred way of doing it particular if I'm doing some animation is selecting the keys and just deleting them like so so let's look into a rendering now I'll I'm just gonna change this back to my classic and then we'll get back our little models or ruled statue models and then let's let's talk about rendering currently you see I have the wireframe selected which is a bit crazy because we don't have to see wireframe on them and we're also going to go into the camera view as well we can do this but go into panels perspective and render camera I already have a camera selected I only have a camera created which I can just go into if you want to create a camera this is very easy to do you can go to create camera and camera or if your in perspective you hold on spacebar on a Maya perspective view you can navigate to where you want to go and you can do ctrl shift and C you can see this creates a camera from the location you're at you can also just double click on it and you can call this camera render whatever it might be let's just delete this so let's go to panels perspective render cam and I've already set this up and now we can open up through our Knoll render view so our neural render view under Arnold and Arnold open Arnold render view and this gives us the on render view so if we were to now hit the play button this is now going to start to render and this is a bit finicky sometimes where it doesn't actually go to correct camera so I just have to go in and just change this to the correct camera in this case it does actually do the correct camera but sometimes you just have to force it in and you can see that this is a this just keeps rendering and it's a really powerful way of working it also adopt it as well so you can set this top menu and just move this over to the right and then we can just dock it in the middle see this blue line and there we go and now this is gonna keep rendering down here you can see that it's just it just keeps on rendering by default though it's gonna be perfectly black and that's because there aren't any lights but we'll get to that in a second let's open up the Arnold render settings and we can do this by clicking on this little clapper with a gear icon on it you can see we have the actual Arnold render settings or these are just the general settings and we have Arnold settings here but let's just go through them first up we have what is the actual file I'm gonna be this is when you you've a sure in a real out what format is gonna render to the general satis dxr what's the frame range well currently there is none because the frame extension is set to frame this extension this single frame we can set this to name dot hash and this gives us an actual frame range so now I can set this to be hundred fifty let's can render from frame 1 to frame 150 what render camera should I render from it's gonna render from the one we said to be render camera what's the resolution gonna be it's going to be a customer solution which I was just said to be 450 or you can go in here and can change this to more standard resolution like HD 720 so these are all my default settings basically what frame what's for what frames should it render what's the format what's the camera and what's the resolution the next step we have the actual Arnold render settings these are specific to the Arnold engine and this is really one of the reasons I like Arnold so much because Arnold values human time way more in the computer time so some things might take a bit longer to render an Arnold but it's much easier to actually set up the way you're controlling Arnold is essentially by controlling the noise levels so here we have the overall noise levels which is a a just anti-aliasing that we have diffuse which is the quality of the global illumination the specular samples the transmission which is just another word for the refraction the transparency rather then we have subsurface and then we have the volume indirect as well so you can see this is just set to two different numbers we have different numbers up here and what do these mean Arnold is very simple once you understand it first off we have camera a a and this is a general multiplier for the other ones so let's look into this let's do some quick math so here you can see we have three samples and this is three times three it's three squared so three times three is nine and we see we have nine samples up here then we have two specular samples that's two times two which is four and then we have four times nine which is 36 and that's exactly what we're getting here so that's why we have 36 samples and this becomes important right now you can see it's not dealing with a lot of samples but this becomes very important when you start changing these numbers because if we were to change this number from three to five which is a pretty seemingly insignificant number now you're talking are you talking not four not not four times nine you're talking a much higher number are you talking 5 times 5 which is 25 so tired talking here 4 times 25 instead so the numbers just keep going up a lot so if we know were to just practical change this now it will change this from 3 to 5 you can see this goes from 36 to 100 which goes up a lot so to a hundred and if we were to change the diffuse to 5 as well you can see it goes to 600 so it's really important to not go too crazy with this the default numbers are generally quite good the way I'm dealing with Arnold is um I'm looking at 3m over a render that I'm seeing what part I have to pump up if I have to only increase the samples for the global illumination the diffuse I'm just doing that I'm leaving everything else but these wasn't generally quite good and then if you are in a hurry and you do this sometimes if I don't really care how much does single-frame takes and I'm just going on for lunch I'll just set this to something like 6 and everything just increases a lot but this just means that we just generally know that it's probably gonna be a quite noise-free image even though it's gonna take much longer to render so essentially it's these numbers multiplied by themself multiplied by this number up here now there are bunch more settings but you can just look through Arnall documentation to learn what these are we're not gonna cover this in this series because this tutorial will then be hours-long what we are going to be covering though is Arnold material this is called AI standard surface and it's amazing we can assign this by clicking on a model right mouse button assign material new material and then we can go to Arnold and then we can click on AI standard surface and this creates on a a standard surface for us now if we were to go up to Arnold open Arnold render view and we already have it here if you don't have it then it's going to pop up and we can ice it play now you can see that this is going to be crazy overexposed but we can change this we can change this with materials we can also use a render region if you hold on the shift key and you can just drag on top of her now you can see it's only gonna be affecting her rather the region we can also just move this up a little bit so we're only affecting her there's no reason to waste time by rendering something else it's not working change the color basically what color she's gonna be you can just make a lot darker we've changed the specular roughness from from zero which is complete mirror super sharp to all the way up to 1 which means there is basically no reflections to speak off or you can set something in the middle which means it's kind or reflective we can change it to a metal by changing the metalness from 0 to 1 so now you can see this this just reads as a metal right away so you want to make this something more like gold or copper you can just change this to be something more gold or copper like so the metalness is really awesome because it just it's just an instant ice and metals light slider then we are transmission which doesn't work if we have metalness enabled so if we can see we enable this we enable metalness we can't have transmission meaning you can't have you can't have a material which is metal and also glass so we set the transmission out to be 1 and now you can see this now becomes like glass material we change the color off it so now we can make this something like a yellow material a yellow glass red glass whatever it might be and we can disable this again and now we can make this subsurface subservience super-nice and arnold if we enable this you can see this becomes really sub surfacing we just change the color of it this is where you plug in your actual color map if you're dealing with skin and we change the radius as well to something a lot lower so if you set this to something like this you can see we're gonna have subsurface in certain areas we can also change just the type to random walk me to which general gives us a lot more accurate subsurface so this is what this is what I'm doing a lot from dealing with skin what I'm doing what I'm doing skin shade in Arnold which is probably the stuff I've most experienced when Arnold because that's the stuff I can do then I'm dealing I'm dealing exclusively with the AI standard surface and with random walk feet you you really don't need a specific skin shader or anything like that you know without a coat which is mark a clear coat which just gives you like another set of reflection and top kinda like a car paint shader so the a einsteinium surface is really probably the best shader ever used it's really easy to use and it gives you fantastic results now let's look into the hypershade real quickly the hyper shed is where we can really do a lot of the fancy shading we can access it by clicking on the bowl up here and here you can see all the different materials we have so if you want to if you want to find this material probably the best way to do is just name it and do that up in the top of the node call this test shader and I was easy to see and then we're gonna scroll down here and you can see there we go test shader and now I can middle mouse button drag this into the hypershade and there we go and now we can click input output and now you can see that we have a test shader so all the materials have to go into a surface shader as well so you see we have the shader which goes into an actual surface shader as well this is what we can also input displacement so if we're dealing with spaceman you will make a material and plug this under or panicum map and plug-in this under the displacement shader so what we can do we can import a file like an actual texture map so if we want to do this we can go under base and the color we can click on the input here then we can click on file and this is how you actually connect up a texture so if you have your own textures made in substance Mari whatever it might be you can this is where you plug it in so you can now just find texture you want here is just a texture I just I just I have from the intro to my series we're not freely including in scene files with this video but you will get all these textures if you are if you get to full course so now we have a file texture assigned to the actual test shader and here you can change the the color space and we can also change the UV toggling mode so for instance if you made this with yidams in Mari you can just set this for you terms we can also plug this into different slots as well if you want this to run with respect to a roughness slot we can easily do that as well and we can take the out color and we can drag it under the roughness but if you try to do that let's see what happens it's got enough to allow us to actually do this and that is because now we're trying to drag out our G and B all the different colors into a slot which only accepts one color so we can click on a little plus sign then we can do add color and set this to specular roughness and now we can connect this up so this is how you can have one image map and could be connected to multiple outputs if you want to grade these you can do this with an AI arrange which is an awesome node which you can use to really really grade roughness nodes you're going to take actually full the full out color onto the input and then we can set out color again same thing because I've set out color are two specular roughness and then you can start grate it and we're not gonna go too crazy in this tutorial with the specific nodes but just know that the AI range is fantastic when it comes to grading particularly roughness images because now you can really control the input and the output another one which is really useful is the AI color correct so ai ai ai just means there's a color it's um it's it's an Arnold node it doesn't mean artificial intelligence it's just it just constitutes that it's an actual Arnold image and then we can just type AI color correct and not color convert make sure it's color correct and then we can use this as well it's annoying because you can't really just put her in the middle like you can some like nuke you have to actually connect it so input and then we can set the output so this is how I'll often do it now this just means I can now just grade these images right away so now I can just start to do some hue and gamma shifts saturation contrast and all that if you want to create nodes as well you just is very ease dude that's what we've been doing it tab key now you just type what you want so if you want a file node you just type your tab need to file and texture and this is how you create a file node this is what mine did automatically for us when we went under the shader and we just typed click here and create a file node this is exactly the same as what we just did and if you want to drag a new shader in you just middle mouse button drag the shader in like so and the very last thing we're gonna look into is lights there's a high area light we have so we already have an hgri so we're just gonna be hiding the lights we have selector lights and just hide them and this just means the image turns black the first one we are gonna looking into is gonna be the hgri light which is under lights and SkyDome light and this is it's not tackling an hdmi light but is one which gives you overall illumination from everywhere so this is a really powerful light because you can just plug in H to rice and you get very natural lighting right away so if we go to the shape of it this is what we keep we talked about nodes early on because now we had transform and we have the shape so we know we can't do anything with the transform it has to be in the shape see we can change the color off it changes to red you can change the intensity of it and all that what we will do now is that we will input an image under color so under color make a fall node and this is where our downloaded an h2 right before I've download I don't know my H arise from h2 I haven calm and no affiliation with them they were just really awesome so check them out HR I haven so our down were a bunch of them so let's look into this one so now you can see we've this really nice natural lighting you can also go onto in the into the perspective you shift hold on a spacebar and then perspective view and you can see the light here so you can just start to rotate this around and now you can see the lighting changes dramatically based on the angle you can also just good move it like this if you want something crazy you can also just hit pause and play right here and then the next one we're gonna be looking into is can be the area light if you go to Arnold lights and area light now you can see we get a nice little area light right here we're gonna move this into place move it up like so and you rotate it again remember double use for move he is for rotating our s4 scale so we can just move and scale and rotate this into place like so so now we can move it up like so and you're not really gonna see a whole lot happening that's because the intention is that the one and there's no exposure I prefer to enable a lot of exposure let's set this to 15 and see what happens and this makes it crazy bright and that's because this is exponential meaning that a level of value of 14 is gonna be significantly darker than a level of 15 13 and so on so you see it becomes significantly darker so now we have a level of 8 which is pretty good I want to set this to 9 or 10 and base it becomes twice as bright for every single number we can also add some color into it as well so we can just make this a little bit of and have a little bit of the yellow tint or orange tint to it and then we can just hold our control key while being over this and we can now we can just have fine control over the exposure so again control and this drag here to really have fine control over it we also have to talk about a setting here which is called the samples this is basically the same as what we had before when it comes to the samples here the samples the amount of samples will be multiplied by the camera AAA samples so if we have one sample it's gonna be 9 samples which is nothing so generally you have to enable something and set this to something like three particular if an area light which has very soft shadows it was really important that you have nice and soft shadows with really hockey with really high samples so again that's the difference between 1 & 3 it basically goes from no samples are all to pretty acceptable levels of samples so we can duplicate this light around I just pause to render whatever I'm doing this because there is no reason to have this running let me just move it up like so see if we can this get some nice rim lighting on on them we started to get some rim on her and now we're gonna set this just something a lot higher again something like 10 now you can see it we get this nice rim lighting on her so now our render is completed it's just gonna keep on going until it's done you can see your district 35 seconds and you can see the resolution watch what camera it rendered from what the samples are and how much memory it took now we can go to file and we can save image and now we can just save this it's just going to go under the images folder and now I can type render a one and it's important if you actually enable the extension as well generally a PNG is perfectly fine but if you want to do some more graining on it I prefer to do any XR if you're gonna keep working on this in a professional pipeline and you're using something like nuke I really prefer EXR or if you do steel in with Photoshop PNG is totally fine as well and now you can see our render has just been rendered out and set to your PNG which you can open up in Photoshop or whatever or whatever if you want to render this out properly as an image sequence though you're gonna have to change this from modeling to rendering see we have all these different workspaces and then and then go to render and then batch render now if you batch render then it's gonna respect the settings we set here this is where it's gonna be respecting the camera of the resolution the actual name the naming convention and so on so Maya is an incredible deep and rich software and there is just no way we can actually cover everything in an hour the goal of this video is really to give you a good overview and it was a video which I wanted to see when I started out really where are the buttons what's the main console what are the main concepts of this off for now can I just get my hands dirty if you're interested in really learning more about Maya I highly recommend this series this took eight years to make and we really poured our souls into it this is it's over 12 hours long and it really does cover a lot of the things you need in order to get started a lot of the things were covered in this tutorial I also covered way more in depth in the full series if you want to you can check out the chapter list you can see it are like 73 videos so it's really extensive and it'll covers really most of the things you need like x-gen and how all the specific lights are way more animation way more shading way more modeling way more retopo a lot of different things so check it out and link in the description and I hope to see you in the next video and if you want to see more videos like this make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe let me know what you thought of this video and how we can do better in the future

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 57,433

Rating: 4.9342103 out of 5

Keywords: maya, autodesk maya, introduction to maya, learning maya, flippednormals, how to learn maya, henning sanden, 3d tutorial, 3d maya, xgen maya, modeling maya, 3d modeling, spartan helmet, helmet 3d, 3d project, arnold 3d, solidangle arnold, learning arnold, premium flippednormals, learning 3d, 3d modeling tutorial, intro to maya, learn 3d, learn maya

Id: kYQ98Q5UmNo

Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TOASTY675]

yesss my guy, thank youuu!!! I took a break from modelling for like 6 months and i was stonished by how much ive forgotten shit lmao. I've been looking for something like this

[u/Vertebruh_]

Much appreciated, im still traumatized by my teacher’s introduction to maya which was to make me box model a accurate human skull. Im sure this will be therapeutic :)

[u/Frankieneedles]

Ha! Wtf! I already watched this on the Flipped Normals channel. Good stuff.

[u/NinjaVanLife]

saved!!

[u/I_Luv_V8s]

Thank you SOOOO much because I downloaded Maya and pretty much most tutorials are for big amounts if money

[u/ploxx95]

i am starting in maya, wait understand tutorial, thanks