Learn Maya in 20 Minutes

1. Course Overview: Hi, I'm Shane, and in this course I'll get you open running in Maya and around 20 minutes. In this quick overview of Maya, you will learn everything you need to go from this to this, including the interface navigation, important tools, modelling, printing materials, lighting, and rendering. Maya is very high-end industry standard software in the movies, VFX, and game development sectors. And if you save us about learning 3D content creation, but I've never used Maya or any other 3D package for that matter. Then this is the class for you. I have been using my effort over 15 years and I've been teaching my two beginners for 12 of those years. I am a qualified teacher and I put all of my experience with students into the design of all of my courses. The first time something that was introduced, I'll hold your hand through the whole process and thus the same skills or reinforce further through the exercise, I'll take some of the support a way to allow you to more independently put your learning into practice. I also believe that educational content and doesn't have to be boring and dry. So hopefully you'll have a little fun too. You don't need any of these officers to follow along with this course, although you will need access to Maya, I've put a link to the student version of Maya in the course description if you need it. Thanks for checking out my course and I look forward to seeing you in the next step. 2. Create your first shape & learn to move around: Okay, So this is Maya. What you need to know right away is that this is your viewport. You have some common tools and view presets on the left-hand side, shelf along the top, which contains shortcuts to commonly used tools. And the channel box to the right where you can change some of the properties of your 3D meshes. We'll cover these in more detail as we move along. Now it's time to create your first shape. Click on the cube icon from the poly modeling shelf and as if by magic acute appears at the center of the grid. Let's resize it. On the left of the screen, I'll click on the scale tool which brings up these manipulators. Click and drag on these to resize the cube to be about the same size as the grid. First on the x-axis, and then the same on the zed axis. Now if you look in the channel box, you can see the name of the mesh. Let's just click here and rename it to base. You can also see the size of the mesh on the scale x, y, and z. Let's neat and they sought, by setting the size to exactly 24 on the scale x and z are, I'mma leave it at one on the y-axis. Now I just wanted to adjust my view a little so we'll cover movement in Maya. You need a three button mouse to be able to use my up properly because 3D movement is handled by holding the Alt key and by pressing one of the three mouse buttons, Alt and left button for tumble, Alt and middle button for tracking and Alt and right button for Dolly. I'll just use a combination of these three camera controls to position my view so that it looks like this. Make sure you're comfortable with movement before moving on to the next part of the exercise. 3. Use bevel & duplicate to create floorboards: Okay, we're off to a good start. Let us say a little more detail with some floorboards. Let's create another cube. Name it floorboard. And we'll need to move the bass down so we can see the new cube. Click on the base to select it, and then click on the Move tool. You'll see three arrows showing which directions you can move them. Session, I'm going to grab the green one to move the bass down below our new cube is a little difficult to see the new cube. So I'll just click up here to show the wireframe. And also click here to hide the grid better. Now let's edit our floor board, select it, resize it, and then move it down a little so it's just about flush with the base. Then move across to the near edge like this. To make this look a little less boxy, we're going to bevel the edges with the flow but still selected. Click on this icon here to bevel it. A little settings box appears. I don't think we need to change the fraction for this one, but we will add another segment by changing this number to two. Finally, we'll duplicate the floor board across the whole of the base. Make sure it's selected press Control and D on the keyboard, you'll see by the naming of the mesh that it has been duplicated. Use the move tool to move it across so that it's just about touching the original floor. But now I'll show you some witchcraft press shift in day to do a duplicate special. This will create another duplicate, but also move it based on what we did with the previous one. Press Shift and date until you've covered the base in floorboards. One final thing before we move on, select the base, bevel it and set the segments to two and the fraction to 0.2 to keep the overall look consistent. 4. Use face selection & extrusion to create the walls: Next up we need to create our walls. For this will also need to start with a cube and rename it to walls. Then more resize and move it to be something like this. And finally, we need to move it over to the far corner of the room. Now we need to turn this into walls by selecting some of the faces. To do that, we can open the modeling toolkit like this, and then click here for Face Selection. Now we select these two faces by clicking on this one. And then whilst holding the Shift key, clicking on the other, I'm going to extend them by extruding them. To extrude, we click on this icon here on the shelf. I will see the settings for the extrusion pop-up. If we try to just pull the new faces out on the zed axis, it goes a little bit weird. So let's undo that by pressing control and set. This time we'll turn, Keep Faces Together off and then pull the faces our data. Now we just wanted to make the walls a little more interesting to look at. And to do that, we first need to add a couple of edge loops. To do that, you need the multicore tool which can be found here. And in order to add a whole, actually, you need to hold the Control key and mouseover one of the vertical edges. Then use left-click to add the edges. I'll put one here and one more here. Perfect. I'll just turn off the multi cut tool by selecting the arrow tool like this. And now let's finish this off by selecting all of the faces on the top and bottom sections like this. Remember to hold the Shift key to add more phases to your selection. Once they're selected, extrude them. I'll press Control and E This time to extrude and then increase the thickness by clicking on the word thickness here and dragging to the right. To round out this step, we need to move to edge mode, which is over here in our modeling toolkit. And I'm going to double-click on the edges to get the whole edge loop for these edges running horizontally. And then these ones on the corners. Remember to hold Shift to add to your selection. Now with all these edges selected, I'll press Control and Beta bevel and then set the fraction to 0.15 and the sections to, to hand, that is looking pretty fantastic. Wallace. 5. Create the window: To make the walls even more interesting, we will now add a window. The first thing we need to do for that is to make a hole in the wall. First, make sure you are in Face Selection Mode. Then select this face on the inside of the room and the corresponding face on the outside of the room. Check that you have both selected and then extrude them. Now changed to the scale tool and resize the new faces like this. Then move them over to the side using the Move tool. Once you're happy with the size and position, hit the Delete key to remove the selected faces and create the whole. We can now see that the wall is hollow, so we'll cover that over with a window frame. For the window frame, we're going to make another cube. Click the checkbox tab over here to the right and name the cube frame. I can then move it over to be within the window opening. I'll then click on the modeling toolkit tab so I can put it into face lecture motor resize it so I can line it up with the window opening more precisely. I'll move each of the outer faces like this so that they fall just inside the opening we created. Next, I'll get the front face and pull it out in front of the wall a little and then do the same with the face on the back. Now to turn it into a frame, we will select the front and back faces and delete them. Now we'll put the remaining phases back into Object Selection Mode, perform an extrusion with controlling a and then increase the thickness until we get a nice thick frame. For the finishing touch, we'll go back into object selection mode. Use control them beta at a bevel to all the edges, increase the segments to two and then set the fraction down to something like 0.3. To add a little more detail, we'll separate the window into four panes. So let's grab another cube, rename it to separator, move it over to the center of the window opening and just make it a tiny bit smaller. Now comes the clever bit. Put the new cube into Face Selection Mode and select the four outer faces like this. Hit Control and H perform an extrude, turn, Keep Faces Together off and then drag out on the z-axis. Make sure you're happy with the positioning and then bang a bevel on it, a voila, we have ourselves a sexy looking window. 6. Create the bookcase & desk: The room is now complete, but the exposed floorboards and lack of furniture maker like a drug. Then let's add some furniture, shall we will start with a bookcase. You know the drill by now create a cube. Well, wait until we finish before we rename this one, resize it so you get a shape like this, bevel it up the segments to two and then hit Control and D to duplicate it and then move it up. And then let's make one more shelf. Now we need the side, so let's take a shelf, duplicates it, and now I'll introduce you to the Rotate tool, which is accessed by clicking this icon here. You can use any of the circles to rotate the shelf. I recommend using only one at a time. Otherwise lend it with a wonky bookshelf. I'll rotate on the z-axis, which is the blue one. And the little top tip here is to hold J on your keyboard as you do this, to snap the rotation to 15 degree increments like this. And then I'll just rotate it by 90 degrees like so. All you need to do then is move it off to the side, make sure you're happy with the height and then duplicate it over to the other side. To finish this off, we will select all five pieces and then go to Mesh combine to make it behave as one object. All we need to do now is name it bookcase, dial and the size and move it into place. Next, we'll create a desk in much the same way. First, take a cube, gets it to a good desktop size and then hit it with a bevel. Let's mix things up for the legs and create them from a shape that isn't a cube. Make a cylinder. And then you can make it thinner by scaling it on the x and z-axis at the same time by clicking and dragging this green square like so. Once you're happy with the girth of the leg, get the height right, and then move it into place. Once you've got the height dialed in, duplicate it and move it over to the back corner. Now slipped both legs duplicates. I move over to the other side to finish it off, select all the pieces, combine them and name it desk, move it into position, and that's the desk complete. 7. Create a painting, monitor & rug: Now we'll add some more details to the room, starting with a painting for the wall. Let's make a cube, call it painting and get it into a nice thin rectangular shape. Now go to Face Selection Mode and slept the front face, extrude it and add an offset of about 0.2. That gives us the frame. And now we can extrude again and move the face back a little. We'll save the beveling for now and just put it into objects selection mode and move it into place. That's the painting done for now. But we're not really finished with it because it will make a great starting point for our monitor. So let's duplicate the painting and move it out into the open source, easier to work on. We'll rotate it 90 degrees. Remember to hold J to turn on rotation snapping and then we'll make it a touch smaller and a little wider. I'll just move it a little more out into the open as we will now be working around the back of the mesh. We now need to go into Face Selection Mode and select the face on the back of the monitor using control and AL extrude it and use the scale tilted, turn the new face into a little square and move it towards the bottom like this. Make sure it's not too wide. And with the same face selected, we will extrude again and pull the face out a little. Next, we need to select this face here on the underside and extrude it down by about this much. We just need to do one more little extrusion going down so we can make the base. Let's select these smaller faces we just created on the two sides and extrude them out a little bit we need to do now is select these three phases on the front and extrude them out a little. Now you can put it into Object Mode, give it a cheeky little bevel, and then move it into place. Now it's also a good time to go back and Bevel the painting. One final thing before we move on to the chair, Let's make a rug as a cube, call it rock. Make it a rogue shape, and put it in our workplace. To give it a more interesting shape, we'll go into edge selection mode. Select these four edges on the corners, and then use bevel. We'll move the segments to ten and the fraction to 0.9. Now go to Face Selection. Select this big face on the top, extrude it and increase the offset. This will allow us to add two colors when we have materials later on. To finish the ROCC, go to edge selection, double-click on one of these. I just slept the whole edge loop and bevel it, set the segments to two and the fraction to wherever you think looks good. Put it back into objects selection mode and we're done. I've just realized I forgot to rename the monitor, so I'll just get that done too. 8. Create the chair: Now that we have a desk, we will create a chair. The trickiest part of the chat is the base, but I have a cool trick to make it easy. First, we will need a cylinder. We need to change the properties of this cylinder in the channel box by clicking here on the inputs and changing the subdivisions access to five. Now I need to resize the cylinder to be about this size and shape. Then in Face Selection Mode, select the faces around the outside of the shape. Now you can extrude them, make sure Keep Faces Together is turned off and pull the new faces out on the z-axis at enough set of about 0.1. And then you can change to the move tool and lower these faces that little. Now I need to select these faces on top, extrude them, add enough set, extrude again, and then move up. Now we can pop this back into object mode. For the seat, we will take a cube movie top and scale it into shape. Next we can select this face at the back and extrude it back a little. Then we can select this new face on top, extrude that up, and then move it back a little to make it look like a backrest. Now we can go back into objects selection mode and Bevel the two pieces we have made. The final part is to create a new cylinder, scale it down, rotate it by 90 degrees, and then position and duplicate it to create the wheels. With that done, you can select all pieces of the chat, combine them, and then put the chair in place. Don't forget to rename it before you move on. 9. Create a keyboard, book & mug: For the last of the modelling, we will create some small details for the room, beginning with a keyboard for the computer, will keep this simple so it can make it quickly beginning with a new cube, renamed to keyboard, and then move it over to the desk and resize it into a good size for keyboard. Now select this edge on the front and move it down to make the shape a little more interesting. Now we'll use the multi-class tool and holding the Control key, we will add an edge loop over to the far side. Now it needs to move into Face Selection mode so we can slip the two top faces, extrude them to and keep faces together off and then add enough set of about 0.2. Now we'll extrude one more time, increase the thickness of the tilt, and then add another small offset. Move back into objects selection mode or the bevel and make sure you're happy with the position. Nice one. Now will quickly create a book. Make a new Cuban call it book. Now use the scale tool to make it look nice and bookie. Then select these three phases and extrude. We'll add an offset of about 0.06 to make a cover and then extrude again and set the thickness to something like minus 0.05 to finish it off with a puppet back into object mode and then leveling up real nice. Then stick it over on the bookcase for later. When nearly done with the modelling. Now let's just add an empty milk to the desk, create a new cylinder, go to Face Selection Mode and then select all of the faces on top. Here's a tip. If you hold the top Kate, you can click and drag to select multiple phases like I'm doing here with a top faces selected extrude, add an offset and then extrude again and move down. Now go to edge selection mode. Double-click on these edges, making sure to hold shift to get all three edge loops and then you can bevel them. To finish this off, we need a handle, go to Create polygon primitives and choose pipe, move and rotate it so it's alongside the rest of them look like this is a little too chunky. So to fix that, make sure you have the channel box open and then click on poly pipe one on the inputs. Here are some additional settings for the shape and we'll change thickness to 0.3. That's perfect. We just need to scale the shape so that the thickness is more consistent. Now move to Face Selection Mode. Select half the face is like this and then press the Delete key to remove them. Change back to Object Selection Mode movements scale it so it looks like a handle and then hit it with a bevel. The last thing we need to do is combine the two pieces and then moving skeletal milk into place on the desk. Not all of the modelling complete well done. 10. Create and add single materials: With the muddling complaint is now time to make this look a little less Fifty Shades of Grey by adding some colored materials. In order to do this, the first thing we will need to do is open the Hypershade, which is where we make materials in Maya, you can access the hyper shade by clicking this icon up here. Here's what it looks like. Here's where we are completely materials live. Here's a list of materials we can create if I just select slum, but one you can see over here is a preview of the material. And down here you can change the properties of materials, this behaviors or workspace. And you can also use this to edit materials. I'm going to add a viewport by clicking on Window and then viewport. And then you can just click and drag it to dock it in the hyper shade. I'm going to dock it just here. Then I'll just press F5 on my keyboard to put it into shaded mode. I'll also hide the grid in this view so it's not in my way. Let's create our first material then. We'll click Lambert over here to create a new Lambert material. I will rename it to light brown over here. Then I'll click on this gray rectangle here for the color picker, I'll set the color to a yellowy brown like this. Now we can assign this to the objects in the scene, which is done by clicking and dragging using the middle mouse button like this. You can add the material to multiple meshes at once by selecting them and then holding the rights mouse button on the material and choosing add Material to Selection. Now let's make another one. Start by clearing the workspace, by clicking this icon. Make a new Lambert, call it dark brown, and then click on the color picker and choose a shade of brown that you like, then you can add a new material to these meshes. Now repeat this process to create a couple more materials. I created a white and a dark gray and assign them to these meshes. We'll do the other materials in the next step because all of the remaining objects have more than one material that we need to apply. Once you've gotten to this stage, you can move on to the next part of the tutorial. 11. Create and add more than one material: Now that you've applied materials to some of the objects in the room, it's time to add some color to the remaining objects. But this time we wanted to add to a moment here to the objects instead of just one, we'll start with the ROCC. And for this we'll begin with the yellow color. I'll make a new Lambert, call it yellow, make it yellow, and finally assign it to the rogue. Now for the second color will clear the workspace, make another new Lambert. This one will be named read. I will set the color to red. Now we need to put the ROCC interface selection mode. I'll do this by holding the right mouse button over the rope mesh and then choosing face from the menu that appears. I can then select the face in the center and then held the right mouse button down over the red material and choose, Assign Material to Selection. And then you have one object with two different materials. Let's do it one more time to make sure you've got it sorted. Let's do the book first will clear the workspace and then make new Lambert name it green. I will make it a nice green color. Now we'll move the book off the shelf so we can see all the way around it. And then we need to add the green material. Now I need to get it into Face Selection Mode and then select these faces that represent the pages. It can be a little tricky around the bevels, but once you're done, you can assign the white material you should have created for the MLC to those faces, then you put it back on the shelf. All that's left to do now is to make an apply the following materials to the rest of the room, including the walls. Once you've got everything called, Dan, you'll be ready to move on and we'll get the lighting setup. 12. Light and render the scene: Now everything has a material applied. We need to light our scene right now with viewing the scene using default lighting, this is pretty flat and boring, so we'll create our own sexy lighting. Let's start by closing the hyper shade and then we can turn off the wireframe in the view panel. Now, I want you to press seven on your keyboard to go into lighting mode and you'll see it all goes black because we don't have any lights in the scene. Let's create our first live them from the top menu, go to Arnold lights and then choose physical sky. This creates a big black sphere around the scene, but it hasn't really made things in it easier to see. Unfortunately, this slide doesn't really help until we start rendering the scene. So let's get rendering will go to renderer from the panel menu and change from viewport to 0 to Arnold, this little window will appear and then we can click on the red play button to start the scene rendering. As you can say, the light now appears, but I want it to look like it's streaming through the window. So I'll rotate the sky dome like this. Perfect. Now we have some light coming through the window. The light seems a little dark to me though. So I'll open the attribute editor by clicking on the tab to the right of the screen where I can change the intensity of the light to five. I'd also like the shadows to be a little softer. So I'll just move to the AI physical sky tab in the attribute editor and set the sun size to three. If we de-select the sky dome, you'll also see we get a nice-looking background color. This is a nice start them, but other than the bit of light coming through the window, the rest of the room looks too dark and gloomy. Let's fix that by adding another light. Will go back to Arnold lights, but this time we'll create an area light. I will move it up and rotate it with a single line facing down. So it will be going in the right direction. And finally our make it bigger to fill more of the room. It's not really doing much. So I'll go over to the attribute editor and set the intensity to something like 300. That's looking better. I just wanted to add one final touch and that's to make it look like light is coming from the monitor. To do that we'll make another area light, rotate it, move it, and scale it so that it's about the same size and same position as the screen. Now so I can actually see what the lattice doing. I'll set the intensity to 100 and I'll click on the color picker so I can give the light a slight blue tinge. Just for one final flourish. I'll duplicate this light, rotate it around 180 degrees. So the monitor really looks nice and bright. It looks nice. That'll do for the lighting. Let's move on to setting up the camera. 13. Set up the camera for the final render: For the final part of this quick introduction to Maya, we will create a new camera and set it up like a 2.5 D view. In order to do that, let's first click on Create, go to cameras and choose camera. Next we'll make it an orthographic camera, which will give you that 2.5 the quality I'm looking for in the attribute editor, I'll scroll down to orthographic views and then tick the box for orthographic. Now we want to actually look through the new camera. So I'll go to Panels orthographic and choose New Camera. Here's what the camera can currently see, not exactly what we're looking for. So I'll make a few more changes. Open the channel box and then set the Rotate y-value to 45, and then set the Rotate X two minus 20. This is now at the right angle, but for me it's chopping everything in half. This just means we need to move the camera back. I'll go to Panels and then perspective, and then choose purse to select the original 3D camera. Now I can move our new camera back so that it's not intersecting the geometry of the scene anymore. Nothing go back to viewing the scene with a new orthographic camera. Nothing is being chopped in half. And the last thing to do is to position the camera so I can see everything. 14. Conclusion & Thanks for watching :): That's everything well-done for making it to the end. If you want to, you can add some more details like filling the bookshelf or adding another painting. Or you could even create some new models of your own. This was only intended to be a quick introduction to Maya. So if you feel like you want a more thorough and detailed cluster work through, then you can also check out my complete beginners guide to my class, which is also linked in the course description. If you enjoyed this course and found it useful than I would be eternally grateful if you could leave review of the class is positive reviews like yours that tell Skillshare that the cost is I'm creating a God which will make it easier for other beginners to find them. Thanks so much for taking my class and I really hope to see you in another class in the future.