ResPower Education Center: Maya, Part I - Rendering a Simple Scene

Figure 1: This is the normal Maya view.

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Figure 5:

Figure 6:

Overview

ResPower seeks to be an active member of the community of artists and programmers that develops and uses 3d software. To this end, we have decided to start a sort of journal through the process of learning each 3d application. These journals are intended to be a complete step-by-step record of the learning process for a person with no prior experience in the 3d computer graphics world. Each journal will build on the knowledge and experience gained in the previous journals, and will thus increase in complexity as time passes. This first journal will take you through the process of opening Maya, and modeling and rendering a very simple scene.

A Simple Scene

The first step is to start up Maya. I'll be using version 7.0 until further notice. Once it is open, you should get the default 4 views with perspective on the top right. At the top edge of the screen, you should see a series of tabs that will select different toolboxes when you click on them. Click on the tab that says "Polygons;" this will provide you a toolbox containing polygonal primitives for creating your models. Maya calls these toolboxes "shelves," and the one you just selected is called the "Polygons Shelf." When you move the mouse over the buttons in a shelf, Maya gives you a hint as to what that button does with some text in the lower-left hand status area. If you leave the mouse still over a button, the same hint will pop up in a pale yellow box near the mouse called a tooltip. Figure 1 shows the standard Maya view with the tooltip that appears when you hold the mouse over the polygon cube tool. It also has the hint at the bottom-left in highlight. Move your mouse over the button containing a cube. The hint says "Polygon Cube: Create a polygonal cube on the grid." Click on it, and a polygonal cube will appear centered on the grid.

Your perspective view should look something like figure 2. You can manipulate the perspective view with the mouse. If you have a mouse wheel, move the cursor over the perspective view and spin the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. You can also right-drag with the "ALT" key on your keyboard depressed in order to zoom. If you would like to rotate the camera around its target (the thing the camera is looking at), you can alt+left-drag to do so. You can also alt+middle-drag to pan the camera left/right or up/down.

Organization

With just one simple object in your scene, keeping track of what's what is no issue. But as your scene grows in complexity it becomes of vital importance to be able to look at a list of names and be able to tell which name corresponds to which object. Maya assigns names automatically to all objects, but they are generic and rarely of much use. We will now change the name of the box we just created.

At the top-right of the screen, you should see three buttons, as shown in figure 3. The first has a hint indicating that it will bring up the "Attribute Editor." The Attribute Editor is exactly what it sounds like; it allows you to edit the attributes of the objects in your scene.

Click on the "Attribute Editor" button. Maya will present a set of tabs on the right containing attributes for nearly everything associated with your cube, as shown in figure 4. To change the name, simply delete the name in the text input and type a more appropriate name.

Render

Maya has dozens of options for rendering but we will save those for later. For now, make sure the "Perspective" view is selected. It should be highlighted with a blue rim, but if it is not, simply left click inside the Perspective view to select it. Now you need to find a small button in the upper right portion of the screen. It looks like a clapper board like you see in the "behind the scenes" footage from Hollywood movie productions; we've highlighted it for you in figure 5. If you hover over this button, a tooltip that says "Render the current frame (Maya Software)" will appear. Click this button to start a render. A window much like the one in figure 6 will pop up after a few seconds with your beautiful box. Congratulations.

Conclusion

This has been an admittedly simple introduction to Maya. There is nothing in this journal entry that your average individual could not figure out with a few minutes of experimentation with Maya, but this provides a base on which to build with future entries. Thanks for reading, and check back for new entries very soon.

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