Bakaneko.com 2004

This Tutorial was created 02-13-04 (Friday the 13th! Woo!) Maya, just like any professional quality graphics application is very very complicated and has an incredably steap learning curve. The very basic concepts that 3D artists take for granted are alien, confusing, and seem completly over the head of someone who has never touched this or any similar application before. When most beginners go to some 3D forum or website and ask for help, the responce they'll usually get is "go look for tutorials", but the problem is that most tutorials assume that you already have some idea what your doing. A tutoiral will say "Select the face and extrude it" and a beginner will be thinking "Well... how the heck do I do that?!?!!!". The purpose of this tutorial is simply to help the true beginner get started from total scratch. I'm going to assume that you only just installed Maya for the first time; that you've never touched any 3D applications before (or at least no real 3D apps, and no, Poser and Bryce do NOT count); and that you know nothing about 3d besides the fact that Finding Nemo, and most all video games out today are made with it. Requirements for making use of this tutorial: Windows NT 4.0, Win2000, or WinXP (Maya does not run on win98 or winME) Maya (You can download the Free Maya Personal Learning Edition 5 here: Click Me to Visit Alias's Site) First: The Terminology This is Vocab and basic Theory of 3D. The first time through very very little of this will make sense. Don't worry if you dont understand most of it. You can come back to it later. Object / Sub-Object There are two primary types of selection in 3D applications. Object Selection and Sub-Object selection. Okay, what the heck does that mean? It means that when you click on a sphere it selects it. This is an object. When you Select a vertex on that sphere you are selecting a sub-object of the object. (A vertex (sub-object) of the sphere (object) controls it's shape. In Maya, you get into Sub-Object mode by right-clicking and holding down on an object. After a moment of holding down, a menu will appear around the mouse cursor with several options. While still holding down the right mouse button, drag your mouse to the desired sub-object mode to switch to it. Mesh Mesh is a term commonly used to describe a 3D polygonal object. Vertex A point in space that makes up part of a 3-Dimentional object. In 3D everything is made up of numbers that the computer computes into a visual display. A vertex is a point in space (the computer thinks of it as a number). The vertex itself isn't visible unless it is part of a polygon. Face / Polygon Polygons are what makes the world go round! At least in 3D they are. If you've ever payed attention to the latest in 3D Video game consoles, you may have heard people talking about how many polygons one console can display on screen at a time versus another console. A Polygon (traditionally) is a triangle. A single surface made up from three vertexes in space. In current-day 3D applications a polygon can have as many sides as you let it (most modelers work in "quads" or 4-sided polygons), but when it goes into a game engine it is converted to "tri's" or 3-sided polygons automatically. Don't care about games? Forget that, just remember that it's the polygon that gives the object a surface. The more polygons you have, the smoother the surface, BUT, the slower the computer will react since it has a lot more data to compute. Edge An edge is the line connecting two vertexes. A 3-sided polygon has 3 edges (duh). When creating a character model (especially if you are going to animate the model) it is important to pay attention to the lines created by the edges. These are called "Edge Loops". Edge Loop Building edgeloops into a 3D model is a very popular technique (the pretty much the standard way of doing it now). On a face, for example, you would build layers of loops around the eyes and mouth, and the loops extend out and around to form a set of loops around the whole face. These loops make facial animation and deformations occur more naturally and save you a lot of headache in the end. But even if you have no itention of ever animating your face, edge loops will result in a more natural and accurate facial shape than you'd get if you simply started with a grid and pushed and pulled the vertexes in and out till it made the shape you wanted. XYZ 3D programs all use an X Y Z coordinate system. It's how you tell where a vertex is in 3-dimentional space. Several programs actually use different xyz coordinate systems so there is no 'set standard'. In Maya the Y axis is Up and Down. Z is depth from forward to back, and the X axis is from side to side (of course this varies depending on your viewport, I'm simply speaking on the default when you load the program.) The XYZ axis guide is displayed in the lower left corner of the screen. UV X Y and Z are coordinates in 3d space; U, V, and W are coordinates in texture space (although we typically only talk about U and V). When you're just starting out with modeling you don't need to worry about textures that much, but after you've gotten some more experience and you actually want to texture these things you're modeling, it's actually good to plan ahead for any texturing problems you may encounter later on. When you go into sub-object mode in Maya, UVs are one of the sub-object selection objects, but when you select the UVs (they appear exactly as the vertexes do) you can't move or edit them at all. You can only edit UVs in the UV Texture Editor window. I'll explain what that is later. Texture / Texturing / Texture Map There are two types of textures in 3D. Procedural maps are generated by the 3D program and don't require that you "layout" the UV coordinates at all. These are generally most effective on things like reflective metals, glass, etc. Texture Maps are images that you create or 'paint' yourself and apply to the 3d object. Since a model is 3-Dimentional, but a texture map is just a flat 2-dimentional image, you have to edit the objects UVs so that they can be flat without creating distortions. Second: The interface This tutorial is focusing on Maya, one of the top 3D Applications on the market. Alias makes Maya and offers a free learning edition for download from their website. (linked to at the top of this page) I have never personally used their free version, I have only used Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited, so I am unfamiliar with any differences between my version and the free version that you are likely to be using. I know that the free version doesn't have the advanced things like paint effects, cloth, etc. but fortunetly I never use or care about those things for basic modeling, so I won't be needing to cover any of those. If you come across something in the tutorial that is clearly not in your version, then I am sorry, but I doubt it will happen. There is no better way to explain Maya's interface than to show you a picture of it, and point at each part while explaining what it does. How I'm working this is I have one screenshot of Maya with numbers all over it. Open that image and flip back and forth between that image and the list below that has a description by each number. There will be additional smaller images with some descriptions to go more in depth about some areas. This is by no means a complete guide to all of Maya's important interface parts, but it is a basic introduction to some of it's parts. Click to Open Interface Image
	1. This drop-down menu will toggle between which mode Maya is in. (If you are using Maya Learning Edition or Maya Complete, Dynamice, Cloth and Live will not be present in this menu). Depending on which mode your in, the menu items along the top of the screen will be different.
Obviously you get numerous very different menus depending on which mode you are in. All modes have the File, Edit, Modify, Create Display and Window menues, but from there on it's different in each mode. If you ever come across a tutorial that says something like, "Go to the menu Animate and choose ..." and you don't see any animate menu anywhere, instead of pulling your hair out in frustration, just ask yourself "am I in the correct mode?" Because chances are that if something seems to be gone, it's likely just hidden because you're in the wrong mode.
2. This set of tabs is known as a "Shelf". Eat tab features a bunch of short-cut icons to things that otherwise are burried deep within one of the top-menus. You can create your own tabs, or add new icons to existing tabs very easily. After I'm finished discussing the interface, I'm going to go through the process of setting up a custom tab. 3. This is the place where you edit existing tabs and create new ones. If you click on the black down-pointing arrow a menu will appear with several options. The first option being a check-box that says "Shelf Tabs" if this is not checked, then the tabs will disapear. To resort the tabs simply select it to re-check it.
	4. Transform tools. These are the tools that you use to move, rotate, and scale things in space. You can use these to adjust an object or a sub-object, depending on what selection mode you are in. The arrow allows you to click on, or drag a rectangular marquee (selection) around an object/sub-object. The little lasso-arrow tool under it allows you to select objects/sub-objects with a more freeform lasso. Below that is the move tool, then the rotate tool, and then scale. When you are scaling an object it will shrink or grow the entire object. If you are in a sub-object mode like Vertex edit, you can select a set of vertexes and push them equally further apart, or pull them closer together by using the scale tool. When you have something selected and choose one of these transform tools the icon around the selected object will change depending on the tool. The interface icon that appears is what gives you control over how the object is rotated or scaled. Play with it for a moment and it should make sense.
5. The Poly-Count "heads-up" display. On initial start-up of Maya this will not be visible. (in other words, you probably don't see this on your screen now) but it is very useful and important! So I'm going to tell you how to make it show up right now. Up along the top menu (File, Edit, etc.) go to Display > Heads Up Display > PolyCount. Now it should be visible. This display will tell you how many faces, vertices, edges and uvs you have in your whole scene, how many are in the selected object, and how many are selected at that moment (the three different columns). 6. Panel View Quick Toggles. These buttons will quickly and easily toggle between the various views. On default Maya will probably open with a single full-screened Perspective window, but one often will need to see the Front, Side, and Top views as well as the perspective view, all at once. To do that click on the 2nd button from the top. This toggles to the 4-view screen. The top, side, and front views are "Orthegraphic" views, meaning that they do not display objects in real perspective. (no linear-perspective depth illusions) The third button down will divide the screen into two panels, the Perspective panel and the outliner window along the left side. The outliner displays a list of every object, light, etc. in the entire scene. This will make it easier to find and select specific objects when you've got lots of objects in your scene at once. I also use the outliner for setting up bones and many other hierarchy things that you don't need to worry about now. 7. Earlier I mentioned the X Y Z axis display that shows up in the lower left corner and this is it. As you move around the scene, you will see that it moves with you and will always be pointing in the direction of the axises. (don't know how to "move around" yet? Don't worry, I'll cover that in the next section).
	8. The Channel Box In the interface screenshot, the channel box appears empty but this will change immediately if you have an object selected. In the example to the left I created a cube shape and the channel box became active. Here you can type in values for the translation (movement), rotation, and scale of the object. If you click on the name of the object (in this case, pCube1, it will become highlighted and you can type. This way you can name your objects in ways that make sense so that you can keep track of them later on when you've got multiple objects in one scene.) Below the basic transform channels and the shape node is the Inputs list. This is where the object history is displayed. Since the only history on this object is it's initial creation only the polyCube1 input is there. I clicked on polyCube1 and it expaned to display the values that went into it's creation. This object has only 1 in the width, hieght and depth values. If I changed these values to 4, 5, and 2 it would change the object to a rectangular shaped box. If I change the subdivision values it would all more detail (more polygons, edges, etc.) to the surface of the box and allow for me to edit it with more detail. If I had already edited the box some and then tried to come back to this inital input and change values, it would likely not work, or have very negative effects. It is not wise it edit old entries in the history on Maya objects.
	9. Layers Box Layers in 3D don't work in the same way that they work in a program like photoshop, however they are very useful tools and I use them frequently. I generally treat layers like object groups. For example, Maya has a "selection hierarchy" that priortizes bones over objects. What this means is if you have a 3d model in your scene and you have created some bones in your model, if you try to select part of the object, you are more likely to select the bones. Maya priortizes them. This can be nice if you're trying to select bones, but if you are wanting to select vertices and keep selecting the bone instead it becomes very annoying. So what I tend to do is create two layers. I name one "meshes" or "body" if I'm working with a character and I add the object to that layer. Then I name the 2nd layer "bones" and add all of the bones and controllers to that layer. There are two boxes that appear before the name of the layer. The first one has a V in it, that stands for Visible. If you click on this V everything that is a member of that layer will become invisible or visible. The 2nd box will toggle between normal mode (an empty box), Template, and Reference. When in template or reference mode, none of the objects from that layer can be selected, but they are still visible. I set the bones layer to reference so that they are still visible, but won't be selected, this way Maya's selection Hierarchy will stop prioritizing the bones.
10. Timeline When you are animateing, this area is very important. This is the timeline and any keys that you make will show up here. The two asterisks below this are are also important. The text area that says 325 in my example displays the total number of frames you have in your scene. If you type in a larger number than what is already there, you will see the small grey bar (where the first asterisk is) shrink. If you click on this bar and drag it you can see the time slider move back and forth. If you click on the small grey boxes on either end of this grey bar it will increase or decrease the amount of the time slider that you are zoomed into. If you want to play with animation, try this exercise. Make sure you're in Modeling Mode. Click on the Tab called Polygons. Click on the icon of a box. (A cube should appear in the center of your screen) Down along the bottom-right of the screen you should see a small button with a picture of a key on it. When you click on this button it turns red. Click it. Select your box so that the various transform options appear in the channel box Click and Drag on the word "Translate X" down to "Scale Z". This should highlight the WORDS in black. Right-Click in this black selected area and hold till a drop-down menu appears. While still holding down, move down to where it says "Key Selected." This will create the first keys. At this point, all of the channels you had selected should turn orange. When a channel is orange it means that it has keyframes on it. Click further in your timeline (around frame 20 or so). Using the move tool or by typing a value into one of the Translate text feilds in the channel box, move the box somewhere new. This should have created a small red tic-mark on the frame you are on, down in the timeline. Now drag back and forth on the time-slider from from 0 to frame 20 to see the box move. You've just made an animation (a very simple one, but an animation none-the-less.)
Third: Getting Started Okay, now that we've pointed at the program and explained a few tidbits about a very very small portion of the initial interface, lets start actually playing with the program. 1. Navigation: So how the heck do you move around in this thing? I can click the icon to make a box appear, but how do I move around it? Let me start to answer your question, buy asking your another one - Does your mouse have 3-buttons on it? A left-button, right-button, and a middle button (or a scroller that also acts as a button). If your answer is "No", then you've got a problem. Moving around in Maya requires the use of each of those three mouse buttons and the Alt key. Holding down Alt+Left Mouse Button (LMB) will let you move all around the center of the screen, or around whatever is selected at that moment. Holding down Alt+Middle Mouse Button (MMB) will let you pan around the screen while maintaining the angle of view. And holding down Alt+Right Mouse Button (RMB) will let you zoom in and out of the screen. I recommend you turn on your grid so you can better see what's going on. In your main viewport there is a small white bar along the top of the screen (just above the poly count heads-up display we turned on earilier) that says View, Shading, Lighting, Show, and Panels. Click on Show and go down to Grid. Check it and you will be able to see the grid of your perspective view. You should now have a better idea of what your doing as you practice moving around in the viewport. 2. Creating a Custom Tab: There are lots of quickly accessable and useful icons in the Tabs Shelf in Maya. The problem is that they're spread all over the place and can be just as tricky to finds the ones you actually care about as if you were just going through the traditional menus. Because of this, I have a tendency to create one "Custom" tab that has all of the shortcut icons that I commonly use in my day-to-day Maya use. It's usually a mix-and-match of several short-cuts found in a couple of the other tabs, in addition to several that aren't found anywhere else. To add a shortcut icon to a tab all you have to do is have that tab selected, hold down Shift and Control at the same time, while selecting the desired tool through the traditional menus. Instead of activating that tool, it will add a shortcut to that tool to the active tab. These are tools that I always have in my Custom tab: Split Polygon Tool - Allows you to cut new edges into polygons Extrude Face - Allows you to select a face or faces (polygons) and push them in or pull them out to extend the shape. Merge Vertices - Lets you take multiple verticies and combine them into one. Delete Edge Tool - Allows you to delete an edge without deleting the connecting polygons. The more you work with the program, the more tools you will find that you like to use that arent' listed here. These are just the tools that I prefer. Most of these tools are found under the Edit Polygons menu. If you don't see an Edit Polygons menu, make sure you are in Modeling Mode. You probably already have an empty "Custon" tab in your tabs shelf, but in case you don't (or if you ever want to make a new tab yourself) this is how you create a new tab. Click and Hold Down on the small black arrow on the left of the Tabs Shelf and select Create New Shelf. A window will pop up prompting you to name the new tab. Name it whatever you want and click OK. The new Tab will appear at the end of your Tabs. Now click on that tab to make sure it's active. It should be empty. Now we're going to add some shortcuts to it. Make sure you're in Modeling mode so that you can see the Edit Polygons menu. Hold Down Control and Shift, click on Edit Polygons > Split Polygon Tool. A new icon should appear in your Custom Tab Shelf. If it didn't, but instead you're cursor has now changed to a strange arrow (the split polygon tool) then you probably were not holding down Control and Shift keys during the entire process. Do this again for each additional tool you want (those listed above are good examples of a nice set of custom tools). In addition to tools, there are several windows that I add shortcuts too in my custom tab. There are lots of windows in Maya that are important to open up on a regular basis, but it takes several menus and sub-menus to get to them and they are scattered all over. It's much easier and quicker to just add a shortcut icon to open each of them. I have shortcuts to these windows: Hypershade (Window for creating and managing Textures) Blendshape (Blendshapes, or Morph Targets in Max, are copies of a mesh with slight variations, good for making facial expressions) Component Editor (This window has numerous uses, but is mostly used for controling the weights of skinned attributes like bones, clusters, and other deformers) UV Texture Editor (This is the window where you can control the UVs of your 3D mesh for textures) Graph Editor (When you create an animation, the "inbetweens" generated by the program between the key frames you create are displayed as graphed curves in this window) You won't need to worry about any of these for a while, so it's not nessecary that you do this right now, but just so you know where they are, I'll list how to get to each one through the traditional menu system. Hypershade: Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade Blendshape: Window > Animation Editors > Blend Shape Component Editor: Window > General Editors > Component Editor UV Texture Editor: Window > UV Texture Editor Graph Editor: Window > Animation Editors > Graph Editor I recommend trying to open any of the editors in these various window menus and get an idea of what is what (although I'm sure that many of them will remain a mystery for you for some time... even I still don't know about a number of them and I've been using this program for 4 years). 3. Actually Modeling Something! Okay, Okay! I wanna do something!! Enough with all these confusing menus and buttons! Just tell me how to make something!! Okay, but think of this first: Just imagine how complicated it must be to "make something" in a program that is this complicated just to get setup!! There is no magic "make character" button in any real 3D program (and Poser doesn't count!). It takes a lot of work and a loooot of practice before you even start to get good results. It'll probably be a long while before you start to get results that don't look like complete junk. I would estimate that I modeled over 5 "human" heads before I finally started to make a head that looked like a head, and not a deformed mutated freak-monster. That being said, I'm not going to start out by showing you how to model something organic (no people or heads), rather I'm going to start with a simple object; A Prop. In this case, a dagger.

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