Maya 2020 - A Tutorial For Beginners

so here I am with a fresh install of Autodesk Maya 2020 and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to uncheck highlight what's new I'll uncheck show this at startup and then I'm going to press the ok button I'll go up here to my shelf I'm gonna switch from curves to poly modeling and the reason for that is I just use poly modeling tools much more than curves so I'll start over here on the very left hand side I'm gonna create a polygon sphere I'm just gonna click once and that's gonna drop a sphere into my scene now I want to put a few more objects in my scene so I'm gonna go over here to my channel box and under translate Z I'm gonna click I'll press the number 5 on the keyboard and then I'll press Enter or return on the keyboard it's gonna move that sphere over I'll go back up to my shelf I'm gonna click on the polygon cube button and I'm gonna leave that cube right where it is I'll go over to the polygon cone I'll click on that and I want to move this over as well and this time I'm gonna go in the opposite direction as the sphere so under translate Z I'll type negative 5 and I'll press Enter or return on the keyboard so now I have three objects in my scene and I want to show you how to navigate your camera so that you can see these objects from different angles now before you do this you do need to make sure that your mouse is set up as a three-button Mouse okay so for example if you're on a Mac you want to make sure that you have your primary button that's your left mouse button button 3 that's your middle mouse button and then your secondary button that's your right mouse button so you need to have all three buttons at the top of your mouse active alright so if we want to tumble our camera if we want to turn the camera around the scene we're going to hold down the Alt key or on a Mac you're going to hold down the option key so that's the Alt key and the left mouse button together so I'm holding down alt and the left mouse button you can see that my cursor changes and now if I drag my mouse I can tumble the camera I can rotate around the scene okay if I want to pan that's left right up or down I'll hold down alt in the middle mouse button and now I can pin left right and go up or down okay I'm gonna bring this back to the center so that's alt plus the middle mouse button if I want a dolly that's getting closer or further away I'm gonna hold down alt and the right mouse button so I'm dragging the mouse button left to right not up and down it's much better to drag left to right okay alright so once again alt left mouse button tumble alt middle mouse button pan alt right mouse button dolly all right now if you want to tumble around a particular object you're going to remember the F hotkey so if I want to tumble around the cone right here just the cone what I'll do is I'll press the F key and now when I tumble around the pivot point for the camera is right on that cone and I can see that from any angle if I want to go back and see all the objects in my scene I'll press a and there's everything so now I could click on the sphere right here I could press F and then I can tumble around the sphere so that's handy to remember a for all the obstinacy n-- f to frame an object in your scene alright so how do we move these objects without using the channel box so over here we have our selection tools and move rotate and scale so if you want to move this cube right here you would click on the move tool and then you can move it along the x axis you can move along Y you can move it along in the z axis you just click and drag on the arrow in the direction that you want to move your objects okay if you want to rotate your object same thing click on the line that you want to rotate so if I want to rotate on X I'll click on that red line rotate on Z that's the blue line rotate on Y that's the green line right there okay same with the scale tool gets scale from the center or I can scale along one axis only okay I'm just clicking and dragging on these handles okay all right now you should note that there are hotkeys for all three of these tools so W gives me the move tool e gives me the rotate tool and R gives me the scale tool okay now if I want to go back to my selection tool I'll press Q all right so I'm gonna just press Z to undo and bring this cube back to the origin of my scene all right so now we've created some polygon primitives now let's go into some more advanced stuff now to do this I'm going to need to set a project folder because I have a premade scene so project folders are very important to working in Maya in that you create a project folder so that you have subfolders for all the different files that you need for your scene to work okay so here we have our zip file in the Downloads folder and what I want to do is I want to take this file and put it into My Documents folder all right so then I'm gonna go from the Documents folder I'm going to put this in Maya and then projects and then I'll leave it right here next to default and then the last thing I want to do is I want to double click on this to unzip the folder and let's go back to Maya so you're going to go up to file and then you're going to go down to set projects now you might go to your Documents folder and then Maya and then projects now if it doesn't take you there you can click on documents double-click on the folder for Maya double-click on the folder for projects now this time you go to stop and you're only going to click once so you're going to click on Maya 2020 QuickStart and then you're going to press the set button now that we've set our prod folder we can open up the exercise file so I'm going to go up to file and then go down to open scene and I'm gonna open up polygon tools MA now it says do you want to save the changes for the scene we don't need to save this there's nothing that we worked on that's important so I'll hit don't save now here is my exercise file so the first thing I want to talk about is the extrude tool the extrude tool allows me to create new geometry when working with a polygon primatives so I want you to click on this shape right here I want you to press F to frame it and then I'll hold down alt in the right mouse button I'll just dolly back a little bit and I'll tumble around I want to just take a look at our shape right here now I want to modify this primitive shape right here in order to do that I need to go into what's called a sub object mode ok so right now when I select this object the whole thing is selected but this object is made up of edges and faces and vertices in order to access those sub object elements I'm going to move my mouse over the object I'll right click and hold and now I get this marking menu and I can select different elements here I can go to vertex I can select a vertex you can see here I'm selecting different vertices I can right-click I can go to edge I can select an edge on the object anything that you can select you can also move so if I hit W I can move this edge I'll press Z to undo the mote that we want to work in for the extrude tool is face mode so I'm gonna right click and go to face okay so I'm gonna select this face right here and I'm just going to press Q and so you can see I have one face selected it's it's highlighted in orange right here now the extrude tool is on the poly modeling shelf so it's right here so I'm gonna press this button one time it's important that you don't double click on this button if you double click it will create two extrusions and you only want one extrusion at a time so I'm gonna click once on this button this is the extrude tool little gizmo right here now I have some options I can move or scale once I've extrude it and I want to move this face out to this next line right here so I'm going to use the blue arrow I'll click and drag and I'll move the extrusion out so what we've done is we've doubled the size of our shape by extruding this face out it also created four other faces in addition to this one face right here I'm going to hold down the option key or alt and I'm just going to back up a little bit okay so you can see here I want to stop at this line and the reason I'm stopping at this line is because if I go to the next line when I go to extrude this face right here if I press extrude you'll see I'm actually not following the pattern now so I'm going to press Z to undo okay and I'm going to create another extrusion right here so I'll click on the extrude button I'll use the blue arrow and I'll move out to the next line all right so now what I have is I have the ability to select just this face right here and I can extrude again you can move this out click on this face right here I can extrude this out move this over okay so the extrude tool allows you to create additional geometry making a more complex shape out of your polygon primitive so I'm going to finish this pattern right here I'm going to click on this face right here I'm going to click on the extrude tool I'll move this out I'll click again I move it out now if you want to access the last tool that you've used you can hit the letter G on the keyboard so if I press G you can see it's going back to that last tool that I used and I can continue to extrude click right here I'll press G and I'll move that out to the next line all right so the big thing that you want to remember what the extrude tool is don't ever double-click on this tool on the shelf you want to click one time then you want to move that face to a new location or scale it okay all right let's go over to this shape right here so before we do that I'm going to right click I'll go to object mode and then I'll release the mouse button all right so now we're back to object mode on that shape I'll click on this shape over here and I can right click and go to face mode right here now one thing to know is that if you're in object mode and let's say yeah unselect right if I right click over here I don't get that marking menu if I right click on top of the object I get the marking menu now the difference is if the object is already selected and I right click over here I'll get that marking menu but if the object is not selected I don't get the marking menu all right so just so you know it matters where you click my is a very precise tool and if something's not working you have to think about am i being as precise as I can be or perhaps am i clicking on something that I don't want all right so I'm going to select this top face right here I'm gonna press F to frame it okay so I'll now dolly back so alt right mouse button dolly back I want to select this face right here and then I want to tumble to the other side and I want to hold down shift and I can select this face here so now I have two faces selected on this object right here okay so I'm going to press the extrude button and I'll use the blue arrows and I'll move these arrows out all right I'm going to press Q for my selection tool I'll select this face hold down shift I'll select this face right here I'm gonna hit extrude I'm gonna move these faces out using that blue arrow alright now I can use within the extrude tool I don't have to just use these arrows I can also scale so for example if I use this red box I can scale out and it will scale both of my selected faces okay now what's interesting about this is let's say I extrude again and I move out and let's say I want to scale in if I just work to switch to my scale tool and scale from the center notice how it scales differently right versus if I extrude these faces out and then scale here the behavior is different so scaling within the extrude tool and scaling outside of the extrude tool works differently so you have to sort of learn you have to train your eye to pay very close attention to what's happening when working in Maya all right so that's our sort of brief overview of the extrude tool I'm gonna go to object mode and I'm gonna click on this object right here I'll press F to frame it and this time I want to use a different tool I want to create new geometry by adding in edge loops so I'm gonna go up to the menu I'll click on mesh tools and then I'm gonna go down to insert edge loop tool and I'm not gonna release the mouse button I'm gonna hold down command and then I'll hold down shift and then I'm gonna release the mouse button it's gonna throw that tool onto my shelf because I want to use that a lot so I don't wanna have to access it from the menu right here so here's my edge loop tool I'm gonna click on this tool now it says click drag on edges ok so if I click here nothing's gonna happen I have to click right on an edge okay I have to be very precise if I click right here that's close enough right but if I click over here again nothing happens so you want to make sure you're clicking right on the edge all right so I'm gonna click now I'm holding that mouse button down so that I can drag and once I have the position then I'll let go of my left mouse button alright so once again you're gonna click hold and then drag until you have the position of the edge loop in place okay the other thing you have to note is that when you're putting in these edge loops you're actually clicking on the line that is perpendicular to the edge loop that you want so if we're putting in all these edge loops going this way we have to click on this line here if we click over here we're gonna get edge loops going in the opposite direction okay all right so I'm gonna put in all of these edge loops so that they just line up with the pattern right here okay great okay so I'm just going to tumble around and take a look at this and it looks like everything looks pretty good so now the question is this how do we move all this stuff to in place right so I can start over here with something simple like I can click on this edge right here press W and I can move this over and I can sort of see where this needs to go and go over here I can move this over right so that's one way of working now another way that we can work is we can right click and go to vertex mode and I can mark he selects both of these vertices right here right and I can slide those over okay so same thing here I want to mark you select both vertices top and bottom and move that stuff over now some beginners what they do is they sort of click here and they move one of them over and they don't move the other one that's beneath that vertice over all right so they're only moving one and you want to make sure you're selecting both okay all right now there's a much easier way to do this and that is in one of the orthographic views now to go to our orthographic view I'm going to press the spacebar I'll tap the spacebar and let go and now I have a top view I have a front view and I have a side view I'm gonna press a in all of these views just so that I can see everything in the scene I'll press a over here as well all right so this is everything that we have now the way that these objects are sort of designed they're only really designed from the top view so you don't see a whole lot going on in the front view or the side view but if you go over here to this orthographic top view this is really helpful now again I'm going to stress this again because this is a problem with beginners they click on this vertex right here and they move it over and they forget that there's a vertex beneath it it's a three-dimensional object so like over here I'm gonna go to shading x-ray okay so I'll go back over here I'm going to unselect and undo all right so there's a difference between clicking on this top vertex right here and marquee selecting and selecting both of them so you can see right here we've got both vertices selected right here you can also see it over here the vertices that are selected are in yellow right so I'll just say Q you can see right there so if I were to hit W and move it out you can see it a little bit more clearly right here both vertices are selected and if I just click on this in the top view I only get one vertex so once again I have to marquee select and then I get both of them and now I can move this over right I can marquee select this move it over here and it's a lot easier to make these adjustments in my top panel than it is in my perspective panel right so I can dolly back in here pan and dolly right and then I can sort of just easily marquee select move this over I can marquee select a whole bunch see I've got all of these vertices right here I can see over here I've got the top and the bottom row of vertices I can move them all at once mark you select just this one and move that over can marquee select all of these and move this over okay so now I'm going to tap the spacebar so depending on which panel my mouse is hovering over I can tap the spacebar and maximize that panel all right so I'm going to go over here to the top panel tap the spacebar you don't have to click on the panel a lot of times beginners think oh i better click on this and then tap it well if you do that you lose your selection so I'm just going to press Z to undo there's my selection so you can move just move over the panel tap the spacebar you don't have to click on anything and you can move back and forth so I'm going to take my mouse move it over here to the top tap the spacebar and then I'm gonna select here hold down shift I'll select here I'm continuing to hold down shift I'll select right here and right here and then I'm gonna move all this stuff down I'll just mark you select this one section here I'll move that down I'll marquee select this and move that down and maybe just move this up a little bit okay so there we go there I've modeled the key so what I'll do now is I'll right-click and I'll go to object mode I'll press Q for my selection tool I'll unselect and here are the three objects so we've used the extrude tool and the edge loop tool to create these more complex shapes out of our polygon primitives now that we've learned about some of the modeling tools I want to move on to materials and mapping images onto your 3d models so that they can appear to be more realistic so I'm just going to go up to the menu I'll click on file and get out to save scene to save my work right here all right now I'm going to go up to the menu again I'll click on file and this time I'm going to select new scene I don't have a grid in my perspective panel right here so I'm gonna click on this button right here to bring the grid back up all right so I'm gonna model a very simple toy van and then what we're gonna do is we're going to add some materials and textures to make the 3d model look a little bit more realistic so I'm going to click on the cube button right here and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit alright and I'm just going to bring this cube up I'll press R for my scale tool I'm gonna scale this out a little bit I'm just gonna make a very very basic shape for a van to make the front of the van I'm gonna hold down my right mouse button select face I'll select this face I'm gonna press the extrude button right here and I'll move this face out okay and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click and hold and I'm gonna go to my edge option right here I'll select this edge I'll press W for my move tool and I'm gonna move this edge down a little bit so this is gonna be the front of the van all right so I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go to object mode all right so here we have our van and what I'm gonna do is rather than calling it PQ one I'm gonna rename this to van underscore body okay so I can rename my object and that becomes very useful later on when you have ten twenty or thirty different shapes or 3d models in your scene okay so good to stay organized alright let's add some wheels to this van I'm gonna click over here on the poly cylinder I'm just going to add that to my scene and let's move this out I want to rotate this cylinder so I'm gonna press E for my rotate tool and I'm gonna rotate like so and I want to be a little more precise so I'm gonna go over here to my channel box and under P cylinder one under rotate Z I'm gonna type in negative nine zero so we're gonna rotate that 90 degrees I'll press R for my scale tool and I'm just gonna scale in a little bit here so I'm gonna scale the whole thing down and I want to make sure that I'm scaling from this Center button right here on the scale tool if I use these buttons right here or this right here it's not I'm no longer gonna have a circular wheel shape so I'll press Z to undo and I want to make sure that I scale from the center right here okay a little bit more I'm now I want to sort of place this wheel with the man so I'm gonna switch over here to my four panel view so I'll click on this button right here and now I can see the top view the front view and the side view and here's my perspective so I can go over here to my front view and I can push this over a little bit and I'm gonna zoom in I just want to make sure the wheel is just sticking out just a little bit from the body of the van right there and then I'm gonna move the wheel forward okay and then I'm going to ask myself is this the position of the wheel that I want I think I want to go a little bit higher and then maybe I'll just scale down a little bit at W and move this out a little bit okay so over here my perspective panel I want to work on this wheel a little bit more so I'm going to press F to frame it and I'll press the space bar to maximize the perspective panel now I want to select all these faces right here but it's sort of tedius to click and hold down shift and select the faces like this so I'm going to show you a new way to select this stuff over here I'm going to double click on my selection tool okay so here I have the tool settings and I'm going to switch from marquee select to drag select and then I'm gonna click and I can select all this stuff very quickly all that's selected right there I'm going to press the extrude button right here and then I want to scale all these faces in so I don't have an option to scale from the center so I'm going to click here or here any of these three boxes and I'm gonna let go and now I have this light blue box in the middle and I'm gonna click and drag and scale that down cool so now I have sort of like a hubcap and a wheel so I'm gonna just select outside of this shape I'll right-click and go to object mode and then I'm over here in my tool settings I'm gonna go back to the marquee selection and I'll close this alright so we've got our van we've got a wheel and now what I can do is I can just duplicate this wheel so I'll press command D to duplicate and I'm just going to move this back okay all right so right here this is one of the wheels so this is our left front so I'm going to type wheel left and then the front right here and this is our second wheel right here this is wheel left rear okay so we're continuing to label all of our objects right here and then I'm gonna duplicate this front wheel I'll press command D I'm going to move it over here now the wheel is not facing the right direction right here I can see that I want that sort of hubcap shape on the outside so what I can do is I can take this object and I can mirror it across so what I'm going to do is before I do that I'm going to freeze the transformations on this so I'm going to go up to modify and then freeze transformations and that just sets everything back to zero and my scale XYZ is back to one so now what I want to do is I want to mirror this so I'm gonna look at my little indicator here for my x y&z planes so Y is up X is going this direction and Z is going in this direction okay so I want to mirror it on X so I'll go scale X I'll type negative one and now that flips the wheel so now that that little hubcap is facing on the outside okay so I'm going to move this over and just place it okay and then I have this wheel right here I'll duplicate it again except for before I do that let me rename this this is the right front okay press command-d I'm gonna move this back and then what I want to do is in this view I'm just going to line this up with the other back wheel right here okay and this is the right rear cool all right so now we have our toy van with four wheels on it okay so now that the modeling portion is complete let's talk about materials and textures for our 3d model all right so I'm just gonna create one more cube gonna drop that keep the scene I'm just gonna drag this over and just this is just gonna be for reference okay so now I'm gonna go over here to the hypershade the hypershade window is where we access all of our materials for our 3d models so by default every new polygon primitive that is created it assigns Lambert one to that model okay so I don't want to use Lambert one I'm gonna create a new material so I'm gonna go down here to the create tab I'll scroll down here I'm going to find Lambert I'm gonna click on this once so here it says Lambert - and I'm gonna take this opportunity to rename this material I'm gonna call this grid underscore Matt okay and I'm gonna press return now before I go any further I want to look at our project folder because I want you to understand how Maya looks for files and how they assign them and how it organizes your files okay so I'm gonna go down here to my finder and here's My Documents folder I'm gonna go to Maya I'll double click on projects and then this is our project folder Maya 2020 QuickStart so if we look at this folder there's a whole bunch of subfolders in here and in here we have our actual Maya file right so right now this file has not been saved but when we save the file it's going to go into this scenes full now I have some reference images in our source images folder so let's double click on that okay so here you can see there are some edge loop images so I'm going to go to column view so you can see these right so here are some edge loop images so you remember seeing those from the previous section right so that image that you saw in the scene is a two-dimensional image that was mapped onto a plane in Maya okay so Maya when it looks at that scene file it's referencing this image right here so we separate our 3d models from our 2d images and it's just really important that you know where these files go and the structure of a project folder in Maya so the image that I want to use is this image right here which is called UV number grid okay so this is just a two dimensional image it's a jpg I'll open it up right here so you can see it's just a ton of squares with a gradient that's blue and yellow okay so this is just a 2d jpg image and what I want to do is I want to map this onto a material and put it on a 3d model okay so we got our scenes folder here with our polygon tools and we have our source images folder here and then we're also going to use the images folder right here okay all right so let's close this alright so here we are back in Maya we have our lambert one and we have our grid mat so our grid material so over here under the property editor says grid mat I want to go to common material properties and I'm gonna click on this little checkered button right here okay that's gonna allow me to create a new node and I want to select a file so I'll click on that and now over here under the property editor I can see it says file attributes it's asking me what image do you want to place on this material this Lambert so I'm going to go to this little folder icon right here because we have our project folder set already Maya knows oh all of your reference images and stuff are stored in the source image folders so it takes us directly to that folder we can then select the UV number grid and press open so now that two-dimensional images is mapped onto this material and we can place this on to our 3d objects alright so how do we place it we have to use our middle mouse button so I'm going to click and hold so my mouse is over the material I'm gonna click and hold and drag this to the cube now this is a little anticlimactic it doesn't look like anything happened so in order to display any textures any images in our 3d scene we have to press 6 on the keyboard and now it displays that material ok now I'm going to take the same material and I'm going to drag it on to our van so I'll use the middle mouse button and I'm gonna drag this onto the van shape now look at the difference between these two things okay I'm gonna talk about this so right now we are done with the hypershade I'll close this now look at the way I'm gonna just hit F on this cube right here you can see that the way the images displays on this cube everything looks good okay all of these squares they're all displaying properly on this cube well now we look over here at the van and we know that we've looked at this image we know that it's made up of squares but here we see rectangles rectangles here there's like some really weird distortion on the image here there's nothing displaying at all so what happened here well in order to understand what happened we have to go to our UV editor so I'm gonna switch from this single panel layout to this dual panel layout right here and in this panel on the left-hand side I'm going to go to the panels menu then I'll select panel and then I'm going to go down to UV editor alright so now that we have our UV editor up I want to click on this cube right here it's a little bit hard to see our UV so I'm gonna turn off the visibility of our image by clicking on this button right here all right now over here in this pan I'm gonna press F to frame it so here we have our cube it's much easier to talk about UVs with a simpler shape okay so here we have a cube it's a three dimensional object it has six sides here we have a two-dimensional shape that also has six different squares connected okay so what this is is this is our three dimensional object that has been unfolded and laid flat like taking a box and unfolding it and laying it flat on a table okay so if I were to just real quick I'm going to press five I'm gonna go from textures to just shaded mode and I'm gonna right click and hold and go to face as you can see for each face on this cube there's a corresponding face on our two-dimensional UVs so once again you take this cube you lay it flat and this is the shape that you get now is this face this thing over here well yes and no I want you to think of the UVs sort of like wrapping paper on a present right that wrapping paper covers the object but it's not the object itself okay so we can select a face here and it will show us a corresponding face here but it's actually showing us the UVs for that two-dimensional object so if I were to right click and go to UV right here this is the actual thing that you manipulate when you want to change the UVs okay now why do we say UV why don't we use X and y well x and y is already used in our 3d space right here so we have X going this way Y going up and Z going this direction so we've used those letters already so we use U and V to define our two-dimensional space right here in the UV editor all right so I'm going to go back to object mode and I'm going to press 6 to display textures now what I want to now show you is when I switch from this cube to the cylinder right here notice how the UVs are different okay so Maya is laying out the UVs for this cylinder in our UV space and I click back on the cube you can see here's our cube unfolded here's our cylinder unfolded into a two-dimensional shape now watch this I'm gonna click on the van body right here notice that the UVs are identical to this cube and this is why we're having a display problem with our images here is because we have modified our 3d shape here but the UVs didn't change as we made changes to our 3d model okay so what we have to do is we have to go in and tell Maya how to layout the UVs for our 3d model okay so how do we do that all right so I'm going to I'm gonna right click and go to face mode and I'm gonna select this face I'm gonna press Q hold down shift and I'm going to select this face right here so I have two faces on the side of the van look at what's selected over here I still have just that one square right there this I can't even see in our UV space over here so in order to see that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a projection okay so I'm going to go up to UV and then I'm gonna go down to plane R and I'm gonna select the options box right here so here are our planar mapping options and it's asking you wanna you want to do a sample projection of your 3d model which direction do you want so we have to sort of look down here and I can see well I'm trying to project along the x-axis going this way so I want the projection to be perpendicular to the surface that I'm working with so I've got the x-axis selected I also want to select keep image width / height ratio I want to keep that ratio okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna hit this apply button right here now what this projection does is it looks at the two faces in our 3d space and it applies that same shape to our UVs in the editor so what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna move this over into its own space okay so here if you look at these two faces now now we can see by looking at this image right here all of those squares are displaying correctly okay and if we go back over here we can turn on this image you can see how the image I'm just moving this back and forth you can see how it corresponds right so because we have unfolded or projected those UVs it's now displaying correctly all right so I want to do more than just this one side of our van and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a different option for doing a projection on a model so I'm gonna close this plane our mapping options I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go to object mode alright so here I have my van I'm gonna go up to UV and then I'm gonna go down to automatic I'm gonna select the options box right here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna instead of selecting fewer pieces I'm gonna click on less distortion and I'll click on apply right here all right I'm gonna close this now let's take a look so now what automatic mapping does is it does six projections right it goes along all the different axes doing a projection and it starts to remap everything here now there's just one problem and that problem is is I'm looking over here and these are not squares these are rectangles we're supposed to see squares on our 3d model but that's not what we see so there's one more thing that we have to do before we can do this automatic mapping look over here in the UV editor I'm going to turn off the image here if you look at these pieces of the van like if I select this UV shell right here I'm gonna just hit five on the keyboard right so the shape right here is different from the shape over here we know that it should be much more accurate so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right click and go to object mode and over here it's this scale X scale Y skill Z those numbers are all do print what we need to do is we need to once again freeze our transformations so I'm gonna go up to modify and then freeze transformations right now I'm gonna go back up to UV I'm gonna go down to automatic less distortion six planes I'll hit apply now if you look at the different shells right that it's created I right click and go to UV shell right here I can select the different pieces these look like they much more represent the actual shape in our 3d space so if I click on this button right here and I show that and I go over here I press six you can see that the UVs the image looks pretty much like squares going all the way around except for this face right here and that's because this is that this is at a 45 degree angle so that projection that it did from the z-axis going this way it captured that face but it was tilted so the projection is not totally accurate so what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to select this face right here I'm gonna turn off the image right here again so that face right there you can see over here in the UV space it's not the same shape as it is over here so I'm going to go back up to UV and I'm going to go to plane R I'll go to the options and this time I'm gonna select best plane and I'll hit apply and look at the way that Maya is projecting that projection is aligned with the angle of that face right there so what I can do is I can say all right here I've got the whole thing and I just want to scale this down because this is much larger than all the other pieces in my UV space so I'm just gonna drag this up zoom out a little bit drag it up a little more and I want these squares to be the same size as the other squares right and then I can take this piece and just move it over something like this right here okay so now we're looking at our van and it looks like the images no there's no distortion anywhere on our 3d model as we're looking at the images displaying on our 3d model looks great okay so let's go up to the menu for our UV editor I'm going to click on image and then go down to UV snapshot and over here we can see the file name that it's just going to generate and it's going to the Quick Start folder slash images the name of the file is going to be out UV under the size right here I want to make sure I'm creating a 4k image so I'll do 4096 the same thing over here and then down here I'm going to hit apply and close and I get a little error down here and if you get this error what you need to do is you need to go to your 3d model right click make sure you're in object mode and then select the object and then hit apply and close again and now it's saved that file I'm gonna do my image painting in Autodesk SketchBook and you can do this in Photoshop if you want I'm just using sketchbook because it's a free application so I'm gonna go to sketchbook right here and I'm going to go to file and then open and I'm gonna go documents I'll go to my my a projects right I'll go to the project folder that we're working in and then I'm gonna go to images and here are the UVs that we've exported so I'm going to click open right here so this is the side of the van right here and this is that windshield so I just want to let's zoom in on the windshield right here let's draw in just a very basic windshield so this layer 2 right here this is actually the layer that has my UVs so I'm going to rename it so I'm gonna click in the center drag over here to rename layer I'll call this UVs and then I'm gonna actually gonna lock this layer because I don't want to change that okay so I'm now gonna create a new layer so I'm gonna click on this button right here and I'm gonna move this actually below the you layer I'll rename this and this is gonna be paint okay and then I'm gonna take my paintbrush right here I'm gonna go to my rectangle tool and I'm just going to draw a rectangle shape right here I'll take my paint bucket and I'm gonna reduce the sensitivity here and I'll fill that in with black paint so there's like a windshield shape and then I'm gonna do the same thing over here I'm going to go to my rectangle tool and I'm just going to draw in a rectangle like this and then I'm gonna fill it in with paint I use my polyline selection tool I'm going to zoom in and I'm just going to trim this out I don't need this section right here so I'll double click press command D to deselect all right and then I'm going to take my regular marquee selection and I'm just going to delete a section right here okay so now we have is a front windshield here and two side windows over here now I'm gonna choose a different color for the van you can choose whatever color you want I'm gonna go to my background image here just select maybe like some kind of a purple color for our toy van and then I want to make sure that I hide my UV layer okay so I'm gonna hide that so now all I see is the purple paint and the black paint of the windshield so now I'm gonna go to file and then go to add to save and then I'm gonna go back over to Maya and I'm gonna go back to my hyper shade right here so I'll click on that and I'm gonna create another Lambert so I'm gonna go down here create another Lambert and this time for Lambert three I'm gonna call this van and then underscore Matt for material under the color Channel right here I'm gonna click on this checkered button select file right here alright so you can see there's no file attached right now but if I go under image name and I click on this folder alright now let's go into source images so I can go up and I can go to images I can select out UV TIFF and press open there's my material so now what I want to do is I want to take this van matte right here I'll middle mouse click drag it on to the van and there you can see we've got windows on the front and on the side now if I want to make any changes here I can like for example this window and this window don't really line up right so if I wanted to go in and change that I could so I can go back to sketchbook all right so I'm gonna take my marquee selection tool and I'm just going to trim this section right here I'll press command D I'll hold down the spacebar I'm going to move this over and I'm gonna trim a section over here as well right press command D and now I'm just gonna save this file again so I go to file and then go down to save and then I'm gonna switch back to Maya alright so over here I have my van material I'm gonna right click and go to refresh swatch and now you can see that material has updated all right so let's create one more material I'm gonna just bring actually bring this over and make a little more room here so I'm gonna look again for my Lambert right here labor at 5 I'm just gonna name this tire tire mat for material and I'm just going to change the color to black all right so let's select this wheel right here and I'm gonna just drag the entire material so I'm gonna hold down the middle mouse button and drag this onto that shape so there's our black tire and then if I want to I could go in double click on my selection tool go to my drag selection I'll go to face mode right here and select all of these right here all these faces and then I can go to Lambert one and then I can middle mouse click on Lambert one and drag on to just those faces and now we have different materials assigned to different faces right so I'm gonna close that and I'll close this I'll tap the spacebar right here alright so here you can see I'm just going to double click over here go back to marquee select right so here you can see we've mapped on some images and some materials onto our 3d objects and that's like a very very basic overview of working with the UV editor and the hypershade in the last section of this quick start guide I'd like to talk about some of the animation tools so let's go ahead and save our file that we worked on right here I'm gonna go up to the menu I'll click on file and then go to save scene now what its gonna do is Maya's gonna take you to the scenes folder inside your Maya Quick Start project folder so here we have our polygon tools ma so right here I want you to first make sure you're set to Maya ASCII and then right here you can just name this we'll name it toy van and then we can save the file right here alright let's go up to file and then select new scene right here all right so I'm gonna animate a bouncing ball in this final section of the video so let's drop a sphere in the scene I'm gonna click on the sphere button right here and what I want to do is I want to bounce this ball on the grid so let's start by going I'll hit W and I'm gonna go up into the air and over here let's rename this let's call this ball and then under translate Y let's set this to maybe 14 units alright so it went a little bit higher so I'm going to dolly back here there's our ball up in the sky and we want to animate this so we're gonna have to set a keyframe a keyframe is a position for the ball so we're telling Maya the ball is going to start right here at translate Y value of 14 so I'm gonna click right here on translate Y and then I'm gonna right-click and go to key selected all right now what happens right here you see there's a little red rectangle in the channel box you'll also notice that there is a little red marker here on frame one of our timeline okay now our timeline right here has quite a few frames and I'm gonna change the range so I'm gonna go right here to this box and I'm gonna type in 30 and I'll press Enter okay now I need to move the ball down so I'm gonna go to frame 15 right here and I'll move the ball down to the ground and I don't want to go through the grid I just wanted to sit on top of the grid so that means the translate Y value is gonna be one so I'll type in 1 and press Enter now you'll notice that there is no keyframe here on 15 so we're gonna have to go back to translate Y and we'll right-click and go to key selected now I don't like to have to do this every time I move the ball or the object to a new position so what we want to do in the future is we want to always press this button right here which is our auto key frame toggle so we turn this on and what this does is now when we're ready to set another keyframe I'll go to frame 30 and if I move the ball back up right here notice how in translate Y this box right here turned red and we already have a keyframe down here on frame 30 so it's set our keyframe for us automatically which is very convenient so I'm going to go up here to translate Y and I know we started at a value of 14 so I'm going to finish at a value of 14 and the reason I want to do that is I want to be able to loop the animation continuously all right so here's our animation starting on frame 1 I'm gonna play this so we've got our bouncing ball right here and now the one thing that I want to know is is this playing back at the proper speed okay so I'm going to stop this and I'm going to go down here and I'm going to go to my animation preferences so over here under the time slider under playback it says playback speed play every frame so this means it's going to play as fast as it can for your particular computer I don't want it to do that I want it to playback at real time 24 frames per second so I'm going to click right here and select 24 fps and then I'll go over here and press save and now I'm gonna play this again and I notice that the timing has changed it's moving a little bit slower okay all right so we have some animation here the problem with our animation is that it doesn't look natural and that's because the way that the ball is moving it's slowing down as it approaches the ground and it shouldn't do that it should come down from the sky and it should hit the ground hard so what we need to do is we need to edit this animation so I'm going to stop the animation right here over here I'm going to switch to a two panel view and I'm gonna take this divider and just move it over to the left because I don't need to see a lot right here I'm gonna dolly in right I don't need to see a whole lot over here because we know the animation is going up and down so we just have a vertical narrow panel right here over here I'm gonna go to panels and then panel and I'm gonna select graph editor alright so here we can now edit our animation and this is super helpful so right here we have a keyframe on one so we can move this over to one when we go to 15 we can see right here it's labeled 15 there's our second keyframe and then 30 there's our third keyframe and what we need to do is we need to edit this animation so that when the ball comes down it hits the ground moving fast and right now this graph is telling us that as the ball moves down it gets close to the ground it starts to slow down right here right so this is called a slow out right here we're slowing into the movement so we're starting slow and then we increase in speed okay so if we were looking at this graph editor so going in the wider of our graph right here this is our distance or our translate and going in this direction in on the x-axis this is time okay so over time the ball starts moving right here very slowly starts slower and then it increases it accelerates as we go down and then as it approaches the ground the acceleration decreases it D accelerates and hits the ground so we need to change this part of the graph right here so I'm going to click on this right here and I can now take this handle and I can modify it but I can see that well this is not exactly what I need I need to be able to move both handles up okay so I'm going to press Z to undo and what I'll do is I'll go up to this button right here this is break tangents and I'm gonna click on that and now what I can do is I can take this handle I can move this up I can take this handle and move this up and so now what we have is the ball's gonna start slow and it's going to accelerate and it's gonna hit the ground hard it's gonna bounce and it's gonna leave moving fast so it's going down fast and it's leaving fast and then as it goes back up it slows down so we have a slow and then it goes faster faster and then slower here so let's watch this again so here you can see that acceleration right now the problem that we have right now is that the ball is moving too slow so we have too many frames in our animation and it feels too slow so just putting on hold the acceleration and deceleration right as it goes up and down we need to adjust the overall timing of the project so we can easily do that by moving these keyframes in the graph editor so for example let's change the timing so that the ball hits the ground on frame nine so I'll click on frame nine right here and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move this keyframe here the middle keyframe to the position four nine right here and I can click and drag and move this over but I have to be careful because I can move it up and down as well I don't want to change the value right here so I'm gonna press Z to undo I'm gonna make sure that I hold down shift and then I'll click and drag and that allows me to keep the value the same okay so my value translate Y is still at 1 so now the ball's gonna come back up on frame 17 so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna unselect this right here by just clicking somewhere else and then I'll hold down shift and I'm gonna click and drag right up here and move this to 17 so now what I've done is I've decreased the total number of frames for the animation so I'm gonna change the range right here to 17 and now I can play this animation again I can see it's moving faster here there's more energy to the animation so we've adjusted the timing so that it feels a little bit more natural okay so I'm gonna stop the animation here and I'm just going to press a because I want to be able to see the entire graph okay alright so I can see down here that I have to make a few adjustments because we move these keyframes around so I'm gonna click back over here and I'm gonna push this up I'll push this up a little bit okay so I'm gonna play this again and that looks great okay so there we have completed our first animation now up here at the top we can see that the ball is dropping and it's moving slowly when the ball moves the distance is a little bit shorter in the beginning because it's starting to accelerate that's called a slow in and that's one of the principles of animation and then it goes through the cycle then back here as it starts to slow down and get at the end this is a slow out okay so slow in slow out is one of the 12 principles of animation if you want to know more about the 12 principles of animation I have an entire course on my website and I'll put a link in the description below alright so if you've made it through this entire hour you really deserve a lot of credit because Maya is not an easy application to learn how to use what I'd like to do to conclude this video is I'd like to work a little bit more on modeling but I'm not going to do any step-by-step instruction I'm actually going to speed up the footage and I just want to talk about the mindset that you need in order to sort of push through the difficulty when using Maya so go ahead and let go of that mouse sit back in your chair relax and let's just talk about some strategies for moving forward with Maya Maya is an incredibly robust tool but it isn't easy to master when I was in school I had a very difficult time in my introductory class it actually took me a whole year before I felt comfortable with Maya the thing that you have to understand is that Maya was built for power not for ease of use if you want to create anything you can imagine you need a complex tool the complexity is what makes it so amazing but also what makes it difficult think about a skilled painter if a painter can paint anything and it looks real people are absolutely dazzled they are impressed because they know it's difficult to paint a portrait or landscape if it were easy everyone would do it the reason people get paid to 3d model or animate in Maya is that it's difficult to do so remember when you get stuck it's normal to be frustrated this is everyone's experience when learning a complex tool take it slow people move so fast and they are so impatient these days often the reason that Maya isn't working is that you've missed the step in the instructions you have to look and listen closely which is a skill worth developing whether or not you become a 3d artist if you get really frustrated take a break and come back an hour later or a day later just make sure you come back you can learn this software if you stay calm and be persistent the payoff is down the road trust me now if you're looking for a slower pace with more information I've got a free course on my website my introductory Maya course has over seven hours of instruction I use these videos in my classroom every day it's totally free to sign up and you'll have access to the course forever I hope you enjoyed this introduction to Maya 2020 good luck with all your projects and stay tuned there are more videos to come you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mr. H

Views: 93,149

Keywords: Maya 2020, how to, Autodesk, quick start, getting started, learn maya, curriculum

Id: EVZXI7SU9eY

Length: 65min 46sec (3946 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2019