Maya Quick tips and tricks- General


Maya Quick tips and tricks- General


What follows are some quick tips and tricks to make working in maya easier and faster

1. Working without a 3 button mouse
Many people dont have a 3 button mouse, particurly when working on a laptop, so they struggle to do a lot of things. If you're one of these people, dont despere, help is at hand! I you go in to windows> settings/preferences > preferences and chose interface and then scroll down to devices and select wich ever option applys to your mouse. Now if you want to use the RMB or MMB you can hold down ctrl or cmd respectivly (this may vary with keyboard).

2. Changing manipulator size
You can easily decrease/ increase manipulator sizes with the + and - keys. In prefererences you can also change the line size under display > manipulators

3. Use incremental saves
If you're a frequent victim of maya's crashes then to avoid loss of data you can use incremental saves. You can set it up by going to file > save scene > option box

4. Never use ambient lights
Ambient lights are perfect for destroying the mood of a scene. If you use them, only do so at low intensities

5. A replacement for ambient lights
A much better alternative to ambient lights ius to use a cluster of about 6 directional lights. Place them around a single pivot and rotate them apart . You need to keep the intensity to low so you cant notice their directional light sourcing.

6. See shadows in realtime
To get a better idea of how your lights are behaving you can view shadows in real time. Hit 7 to enable hadware lighting, then go to lighting shadows. Also switch to high quality rendering because it is only per vertex on standard

7. Perfection is an imperfect model
One thing that can ruin a scene is a 'perfect' model or texture. The human eye is very good at spotting repitition and consistancy and it can ruin scenes. To solve the problem move random vertices slightly out of lien and add grime and noise to textures and bump maps. When creatign cityscapes never use duplicate buildings, make slight changes in both colour and the model.

8. Reviewing views
You may often what to return to a previous view but you cant do that with the traditional undo command. To undo and redo views you can use [ ] respectivly.

9. Saving your batch render as a movie quickly
When viewing a batch render/ sequance you can go to file > save as movie to save it quickly. Quicktime can also open sequances and if you have pro you can then save it as a movie

10.Dynamics playback
To proparly play back particle simulations in real time you need to make sure that playback speed is set to play every frame. It can be found in preferances > timeline

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