Technical Notes Week #4 - Useful Maya Notes

W4 - Maya - More Learning Notes

I took pretty extensive notes about Maya this week, and decided to include the majority of it here, because I felt it was a good learning experience, and I would like to remember to put these things into action more in the future.

• Working in One Drive is good because you want to be able to access your files from anywhere

• “Projects” are what Maya uses to keep all components together in a folder structure

• No non-standard characters in project names/file structure

• Scenes - all Maya files go into there

• Assets - stuff you’re bringing in

• Images - folder for images you render out of Maya

• Source images - for images going into Maya

• Clips - references

• Make sure current project is selected correctly on the left when saving a file (set project, ensure your files are going in the right place)

• Do not save your file is a Maya Binary file (save as a Maya ASCII File)

• Binary file: file that has been compiled for a computer program 

• ASCII file: has a bunch of code in it in a readable text format

• ASCII is a lot more recoverable/repairable if something goes wrong

• Build a library of tools to store on the custom shelf in Maya (like Blender quick shortcuts/Q menu - hover over a button and cntrl+shift+click)

• Middle clicking allows you to reorder those items

• 15+ years have not needed more than 1 custom shelf worth

• Documents -> maya -> 2025 -> prefs -> shelves -> custom (can grab and move around your custom shelves)

• Click and drag on the text to the left of number values and right click to lock selection

• Outliner/hierarchy view  is to the left instead of to the right (opposite of Blender)

• Don’t touch the default lights and camera just now

• Prefix things from the most generic to the most specific (allows grouping)

• E.g. “geo_car_door_right”

• Cntrl g to group things in the outliner

• Display layers - can create them in the bottom right (clicking V on and off enables and disables disabilities). You can click the third box (T / R) and it will change an object or group to a “reference” so that you can’t select it

• Look through camera to ensure it’s positioned properly

• Hitting spacebar while hovering over the viewport enables multi-view

• Disable the viewcube HUD (slight convenience not worth it for it being able to break stuff - it even ignores transform locks)

• Can use the panels menu to change view (can look through from the perspective of a camera (and move in first person), camera, or switch to orthographic, etc.

• Can store setups separately and reference them (display without importing/editing stuff) - if you change the setup file it will update within all other files (like a prefab - like instances)

• Show DAG objects only in outliner (cause there’s too much clutter otherwise)

• Two types of geometry in Maya: polygons and nurbs (like raster vs vector)

• Can change anchor point/pivot point (holding down D and moving things)

• Magnets along the top allow mesh snapping (faces, vertices, edges, etc.)

• Hold right click and move the mouse to switch between faces, vertices and edge mode

• Cntrl+E allows access to the extrude menu. Insetting faces is possible here (using the “offset” option) and the transform by local axis is basically ‘extrude along normals’

• Cntrl+B is bevel, it always gets added as a modifier stack thing but it doesn’t seem to dynamically adjust to mesh edits by default. You can select several edges in edge mode or just the whole object in object mode to apply it.

• Double clicking on an edge intersection attempts to do what alt+click does in blender (select a whole connected edge loop)