In order to work with objects in Maya, you have to select them. So, let's take a look at how to select objects. We do it using the select tool. So, we can find that here, in the interface. And if we hover over it, you'll see that the hotkey for that is the letter Q. Now, selecting can be as simple as left-clicking, so if I left-click on an object, it highlights and that tells me it is selected. If I want to de-select an object, all I have to do is left-click outside of any object, in other words, left-click on nothing, and that object will de-select.
Another way to de-select an object is to select a different object. So, if I select this chair, and then go over and select this couch, the chair will de-select. Now, if I wanted to select both of them, I can, but I have to use the Shift key. So, I can select the chair, hold down the Shift key, and select the couch, and now both of these are selected. Now, notice how the couch has a different color highlight than the chair. And that's because the couch is the last object selected.
Now, this can be important in Maya because sometimes the order of selection factors into the tools that you use. So, if I were to continue to hold down the Shift key and select this other chair, notice how the green highlight moves. So, if I select the table, again, that green highlight moves and tells me that is the last object selected. Now, if I want to de-select objects, I can do that again by holding down the Shift key.
So, if I hold down the Shift key and click on the table, the chair now becomes the last object selected. And I can de-select all the objects out of the scene. Now, I can continue to hold down the Shift key and just select or de-select objects as needed. Now, notice how that green highlight moves around depending upon which object is the last selected. Now, another way to select objects is to use marquee selection.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and just orbit my camera around so that we're seeing these chairs pretty much face-on. Now, if I keep my selection tool active, I can left-click and drag and draw a box. Now, anything that falls within that box will be selected, so if I hover over these two chairs, they will be selected. If I hover over this chair and the TV set, those will be selected. Now, we can also use Shift in conjunction with the marquee select tool.
So if I hold down Shift and draw a box, I can select the other chair and the couch. And this also works for de-select. So, if I hold down Shift I can de-select by drawing boxes over objects. Now, if a box isn't quite the right shape, you can use a lasso. So, right below the select tool,we have a lasso tool. And this is very similar to lasso tools you'll find in any graphics package.
All you do is left-click and draw a shape over the objects that you want and they will select. And again, we can hold down the Shift key to multiple-select or de-select objects using lassos. Now, another way to select objects is to go into the menu. We have a select menu and we can select all the objects in the scene, we can select all by a certain type, or we can de-select all.
Now, notice these have hotkeys, so alt + D is de-select all, which is kind of a handy hotkey. We can also multiple-select objects and then if we want to we can select the inverse. So, everything but these objects. And we can also select similar objects. And that gets a little bit more complicated. So, as you can see, there are a number of different ways to select and de-select objects so that you can work with them in Maya.
Now let's start manipulating objects. We're going to work with the Move Tool first. Now the Move Tool can be found here in the toolbox, but before we go any further, I want to explain some important hotkeys for Maya. Now these are in the top left-hand corner of the keyboard. They are Q, W, E, and R. Now when you press them, Q selects the Selection Tool, which we've seen before.
W selects Move, E selects Rotate, and R selects Scale. So, if you learn to position your hand up on that top left corner of the keyboard you can do Q, W, E, and R very, very quickly, and it's a great way to work in Maya. It really allows you to move very quickly between Move, Rotate, Scale, and Select. Now, we're going to look at Move, so I'm going to hit W to go into the Move tool, and when we do we can select an object, just like we select using the Select tool.
So I can just left-click on any object in the scene, and it will select. Now when we select an object, this little icon comes up, and this is our Move Tool. Now we have all of our axes here represented by arrows, so I have red for X, green for Y, and blue for Z. So, XYZ equals RGB, and if we want to, I can move it along the X axis by selecting the red axis, the green axis moves it up and down along Y.
The blue axis moves it back and forth along Z. Now there are times when you will need to move it along multiple axes, so you can just highlight the center here and you can move it wherever you want. Now doing this in the 3D view probably isn't that wise because it's not really that accurate. If I go into an orthographic viewport by hitting my Spacebar or selecting my quad view panel layout, you can see that I can actually go into, say a top view, and when I go into the top view and select that centre portion, it actually restricts the motion to only those axes that you have in the top view.
In this case X and Z, so we're not going to be moving it in Y. This is a great way to move an object, say along the floor or something like that.Now an even easier way to do that is to go back into our Perspective window, and just go ahead and select any one of these little squares. If you can see them here, we've got a blue, a red, and a green square, and those are really representative of the axes which we're moving perpendicular to.
So, if I select the green one, that means I'm not going to move it in Y. And so that basically is the same as moving it along the floor. The red one moves it in a plane that is perpendicular to X, and the blue moves it perpendicular to Z. Now once we understand this Move tool we can use it to move multiple objects, and so we can select multiple objects just the same way we used in the Select tool.
So if I hold down my Shift key I can select multiple objects here, and I can move those and rearrange them however I want. And just like with the Select tool I can Shift deselect an object and just move the remaining objects. Now another thing that's really important is the axes that we're moving along. If I double-click on my Move Tool, you'll see I get the Tool Settings.
Another way to do this is to click on the button next to the show/hide channel button under the padlock in the top right hand corner. But once we get this window open, you'll see that we have a number of options for this, and probably one of the most important ones is Axis Orientation. By default, this is set to world space, so anything that we move is going to be aligned to the world axes, and you can see them down here in the bottom left-hand corner of your viewport.
So as you can see, the X, Y, and Z axes here match up with these X, Y, and Z axes. But, we can also change that, so if we don't want to align our Move Tool to the world, we can align it to any other type of object. Probably the most important one is the Object itself. So instead of aligning to the world, we're aligning to the object's own internal coordinate system. So in this case notice how this changes a little bit, but if we select one of these chairs that's at an angle, notice how the axis turns.
So if I go from World view, it's aligned to the world, and here in Object, it's aligned to the object. So this object has actually been rotated by about 45 degrees, and so the axes actually follow along with that rotation. So now if I want to move it directly forward and backward, I can,and it makes it much easier, so it's much easier to push this chair in using Object orientation rather than world.
So if I wanted to do the same thing in world orientation I'd have to kind of figure it out by moving it at an angle, but if I do Object, then it's much easier. Now aligning these axes to an object is a whole other topic, and I will get to that in just a bit. Now another thing that the Move Tool Settings has is a soft selection. Now this actually is available to really any of the major tools, so Select, Move, Rotate, and Scale all have soft selection.
Now if I click this on, you'll see that we have a number of options here. So the first two, Volume and Surface, are for modeling. So they're actually for changing the shape of the object itself. Now we're dealing with whole objects so we're going to focus more on Global and Object. So if I select say this chair, and turn on Object, and I want to make sure my Falloff radius is fairly high. Let's say about 400.
Then notice what happens. I'm going to go ahead and change my orientation back to World, and let's go ahead and just move this along the Y axis, and notice how this is moving everything kind of proportionally, but it's kind of leaving behind this one on the left here. So if we wanted to we could dial up our Falloff Radius just a little bit, and notice how these change color. So, orange and yellow mean that they're going to be more affected, and then red means a little bit less affected.
In fact you can see that that color scheme is if we scroll down just a little bit. So as I move these you can see I can move these proportionally. Now if we want, we can go into Global mode and that actually digs down into the shape of the objects themselves. So, as I move this, notice how the objects start to stretch and distort. Now, typically if we're moving whole objects that's probably not something we want to do, but if we're doing some special effects, that might be something that would work.
So now one of the things is that when I use soft selection, a lot of times I'll click off and I'll go do something else, and this will remain selected, so I always like to get in the habit of clicking it off when I don't need it, because you'll come back to the Move Tool and all of a sudden soft select will be on and things won't behave the way you want, so just get in the habit of turning that off. So those are some of the ways to select and move objects in Maya.
In addition to moving objects, we can also rotate and scale them. So rotate and scale are located on the left hand side of the screen in our toolbox but we also can get to them through our hotkeys. Now remember we have some very nice hotkeys here. We have q for select, w for move, e and r for rotate and scale. So I'm going to go ahead and select the rotate tool and just like with the move tool, we can just click on any object to select it and then rotate.
So I'm going to go ahead and select the couch and the rotate gizmo is a little bit different from move in that it has circles rather than arrows.So I can hover over any one of these circles and rotate around that axis. So if I hover over the red circle, I can rotate around the x-axis. Blue is z and green is y. Now if you want to rotate around multiple axes, you can click in the middle here and that will allow you some sort of free rotation which I find is kind of hard to control.
But notice this little cyan ring around everything and that basically just continues to go perpendicular to the camera. So however the camera is pointed, this will rotate around that particular axis. So if we get kind of a front view here, we can rotate that way. Or if we go kind of into a top view by manipulating our camera, we can do that. So that can be a very handy way to work with the rotate tool. Now we can also rotate around multiple axes so if I select my tool settings (top right of the screen) by clicking on this button or double clicking on the tool icon, we can change our axis orientation.
Right now it's set to the default of world but if we want we can go into object mode. So for example this chair here is rotated a little bit and so we may want to go from world which is aligned to the world to object which is aligned to the object. So this will allow us to say rotate it around this axis rather than the actual world axis itself. Now if we select multiple objects and rotate them we can do that as well.
And these objects will rotate around their individual pivots. Remember that every object has its own coordinate system and its own center or pivot and that's where these objects will rotate around. Now if we hit w, you can see that there's actually a position for this icon, and that's where the pivot point is for any particular object.
Now that we understand rotate, let's go ahead and look at scales. So select the scale tool and select an object, and when we select that object, the scale tool looks a little bit like the move tool except it has boxes at the end rather than arrows, and we can grab these boxes to scale along any axis so red is x, green is y, and blue is z. Now if we select in the middle, we basically do a global scale, make the object bigger or smaller.
Now just like with the move tool, we also have these little planes that allow us to scale or stretch an object along specific pairs of axes. So if I did this along the green one, it would scale it along x and z but not y. And again just like with the rotate tool, we can select multiple objects and scale them. And just like with the rotate tool, it will scale around the object's axis.
So those are some of the basics of rotate and scale and they will allow you to again manipulate and position your objects as you want.
When you rotate and scale objects in Maya, you rotate and scale them around the object's pivot point. Now that pivot point is determined by how the object is modeled, but you can also manipulate those as well. Select the object. Now when we do, go into move mode by hitting W, you'll see the pivot for that object, and if it pretty much centered.
So if I were to go into my rotate tool and rotate this around Y, if it is centred, the object will spin the way you expect it to. If an object does not have itds pivots in place, you can adjust these so that they are. Using the move tool, you can view the pivot and using the modify menu at the top of the screen, hit centre pivot. If the object is symmetrical like a dial on a turntable, the pivot will move to the centre of the object.
This does not work if the object is not symmetrical. Centring the pivot just makes things harder so instead, use the move tool to see the pivot and then hit the D key. Now if we want to we can manually adjust the pivot point by selecting the object and hitting the D key. Now the D key, basically, enables a special mode where we can both move and rotate the pivot.
So if I select one of these arrows, I can move that pivot basically where we want and we kind of want it centered on this object here which is basically the spindle around which it rotates and so if we do that and now we rotate it, we get something that's a little bit more realistic. Now, by holding down the D key we can also rotate the pivot, so if we want to make sure that it's aligned with a specific axis, we can also do that.
So when you create objects, a lot of times the pivot point won't be in the right place. So we can either center the pivot or hold down the D key to manually adjust the pivot to our liking.
By selecting an object, a box will appear on the right hand side of the screen. This contains thee Channel Box/ Layer editor as a tab, which you can see on the very edge of the screen. Conversely you can also bring this window up by pressing the button "Show/Hide Channel Box" in the top right hand corner of the screen underneath the padlock.
From this window you can edit the position of the object in X,Y and Z. You can change the rotation in the same axes as well as change the scale in the 3 dimensions to and also turn off the visibility of the object and the name can be changed too.
There are several ways of editing these values. You can highlight on and manually type the value you want. You can click and drag down several of them and type in the value at the end to change all of them at the same time. You can also highlight one/multiple and middle mouse click and drag to increase or decrease the values.
The attribute editor is a sub tab that is housed in the same position as the channel box/layer editor. This tab is twice as wide. You can conversely press the middle button in the top right of the screen, under the padlock to enter the attribute editor.
Select an object to bring details into this box. There are tabs for the object itself, the shape, the colours and the shading etc, colours and textures and materials.
Main node has similar information as the channel box/layer editor. Can also select and display pivots for the object. In the display section you can display a handle which shows where the pivot is located. Main node determines the position of the object.
2nd node is called the shape node and this controls the geometry and how the object itself looks.
Tessellation attributes allows you to add more or less detail. Can turn on mesh component display which allows us to see the object more clearly. Smooth mesh allows you to smooth out the object and makes it appear smoother when turned on.
In Render stats you can make the object cast and receive shadows as well as a whole bunch of stuff.
There is an Arnold tab which lets us manipulate the object for the Arnold renderer.
any geometry in maya will have this shape node.
If we have added modifiers to the object, changed the shape or manipulated it in any way, additional tabs will appear.
When we organise objects by moving, rotating and scaling them, we change where they are located in space but there are many times when we might wnat to reset these back to a default position and we do this by using a Reset and Freeze transformations.
In the modify panel at the top of the screen, there is a Freeze Transformation button. Now this would reset the positions of the objects to be a zero, so we know this is where they're supposed to be. So as these are now set to the default position, we can move it and if we ever wanted to get back to this default position, we can highlight each attribute (position and rotation) of these and type in 0 to reset this.
Using the modify panel and selecting reset transformations will set everything back to 0 like before however this time, it will also make the pivot be set o the origin. Centre pivot can reset the pivot back to the object.
Freeze transformations locks an object to the centre position where the reset transformation resets the object back to it's original position and move the pivot to the origin
Allows you to snap an objects pivot point to a grid or another object in the scene. To do this you need to select the object and hit the button located under the "edit mesh" panel which looks like a magnet and a grid called "Snap to grid". Centre of the icon changes from a square into a circle (whilst in the move tool). The tool means any object will be forces to snap to the grid however there are other snaps you can do.
You can make an object snap to the vertices of an object, can turn off snap to grid and turn on "Snap to Point". An easy way to see these vertices is to click on Shading and then click on Wire Frame On Shaded which will allow you to view the wire frame on a shaded object. Can also click on the little blue cube icon with a white outline, located in the window icon bar. Move freely on the grid however when it approaches the objects on the screen, snaps to the vertices. If object has an underside, the object can also snap to that too.
Try to only have one snapping on at one time as can conflict with each other.
Edit, Duplicate. Hotkey for this is Ctrl + D. Object will appear at the same position as the duplicated one so you will have to move it in order to see it.
If you wanted to be efficient with the duplication, you can Duplicate With Transform which copies the transformation with the duplication, hence you don't have to move the object to see it.
Creating arrays. Select object and click on Duplicate Special (can change the options for this by clicking on the little box on the right of that button). This gives us the ability to copy the object or to create and instance which refers back to the original. You can translate this using the translate values which will move the object a certain amount of units each time. If it duplicates in the wrong direction, hit Ctrl - Z and then change the translation to a negative value (or positive depending on what you did before).