From the course: Maya: Natural Environments

Using the exercise files - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Natural Environments

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Using the exercise files

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- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files I've provided with this course, you can go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location. I've got them here on my desktop. This is a standard Maya project folder, but I've added a couple folders to that. We've got a Photoshop folder with a few documents in there, and also a Unity folder. And that has a Unity project. I've compressed that into a zip archive. So if you want to open the Unity project you'll need to extract the files from that archive. In the scenes folder, we have the Maya ASCII scene files. There's generally one scene file per movie. Occasionally there will be a finished example showing what that should look like at the end of the exercise. If there's not a finished example, then that usually means that the exercise files flow from one to the next. In other words, 01_04 is the begin state for that movie. 01_05 is the end state for 01_04. Some of the scene files have XGen files associated with them. And those are XGen definitions, which in this case are to apply grass onto surfaces. Those XGen files are required in order to open the scene. There's also an XGen folder and inside there are some files that you will need in order to open some of the scenes. I'll give a full explanation of what all this stuff means later in the course. Whether or not you have the exercise files, you'll need to set a Maya project to complete the exercises. So I've got Maya open here, and currently it's set to the default project. If we go to the File menu to Project Window, we'll see that we're pointing at the current user's documents, Maya projects default. So if you don't have the exercise files you need to create a project folder for the course and you can click the new button and call it something like Maya natural environments, and then define a location, click on the browse button. And I can just go to the desktop and click Select, click Accept, and that creates the project and also sets Maya to that project, so it's now active. If I go to the File menu and choose Open scene, I'm taken to current user desktop Maya natural environments, scenes. So this is if you want to create your own assets for the course. If you're using the exercise files, simply set Maya to the existing exercise files project folder. From the File menu, choose Set project, navigate, in this case to the desktop. Here's the project, it's called Exercise Files, click Set. And then if we go to File, Open Scene, we're taken to the listing of all the exercise files scenes. All right, so that's how to set up the exercise files for Maya natural environments.

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