Basics of Maya

In this tutorial we will be going over how to move around the workspace, how to create simple shapes within Maya and how to edit these shapes using the different maya features available.


When in maya you will need to move your camera angle around quite a bit so that you can see all sides of the object that you are trying to Model. The way in which you can do this is very simple. While holding the alt key and left clicking you will be able to rotate your camera around your scene, alt and scroll wheel pressed allows you to move the camera on the axis and alt + right click allows you to zoom in and out with the camera.

When you are on the workspace, if you press the space bar once it will split the workspace into four sections and you will be able to see it in 4 different perspectives. Those perspectives are, Top, Side, Front and the main one which is your own perspective which you can move around using the controls above.

Creating a Polygon Shape

Within maya you can create anything that you can imagine. Each creation you make will more or less start with a basic polygon shape. In maya you can create many different polygon shapes just buy clicking these icons.

Another way to create the polygons is to go to create in the menu bar then go to polygons then select the shape that you want.

Once you have selected a polygon shape you drag along your grid in your workspace to set the width of the polygon then drag up to set the height. now this feature is fine for practicing but if you want to create something from scratch the best thing to do is to turn that feature off so that you don't have to drag the shape. That feature is known as interactive creation.

The way to turn that off is to go to Create then Polygon then Interactive creation which will be at the bottom and uncheck it. What this does, is when you click on the polygon shape it will create the shape in the centre of the grid when interactive creation is turned off.

As you can see here, Interactive creation is on and it will be for you, so just uncheck that for now as we wont be using it.

Editing the Shape

To edit the polygon shape, in this example I will be using a cube, you can select the object and use these tools on the left side to resize move and rotate it.

These allow you to customise the shape of your polygon to how you want it.

The 3 main ones we will focus on are, Edge, Vertex and Face.

The vertex mode allows you to select the vertices/corners of your shape and resize, move and rotate them.
The edge mode allows you to do the same but for the edges and the face mode allows you to select the faces and again you can do the same things as the other 2.

A Feature which is available when in Face Mode is the Extrude option. When you are in face mode you can select a face and press the extrude icon to create a new face which is attached to the object but can be altered in scale, position and angle without affecting the original shape itself.

Here we have a cube in face mode and it has not had an extrude applied to it.

So, when we select one of the faces and we click on the extrude icon which is this one[​IMG] which can be found under the polygon tab that we seen earlier, it will bring this up on the selected face.

From here, if we use the arrows on the axis it will move the new extrude we made, also if we use the red, green and blue cubes it will change the scale of the new extrude.


As you can see here, we have pulled the new extrude out and have scaled it in. After this has been done, we can see that it has changed the shape of the extrude but the original cube shape is still present.

Thats all for this tutorial I hope that you managed to learn something from this and enjoyed it, if you did please leave a like on this thread :smile: . Also keep checking in on this section as there will be more tutorials on Maya to follow this one.

Credit to JayHD 

Looks complicated lol

i can use this and teach it - This what i use for my fathers business .

Thank for the tutorial, each version can be a little different , if you like a version of Maya i can get you the program with a hack. Also you can use it for free with a student license.