Setting preferences and interface options

- [Instructor] Let's begin by setting up the Maya user preferences and also streamlining the interface a little bit. We first want to make sure that all of the appropriate plugins are going to load. So let's check in on that in the windows menu, under settings preferences, plugin manager. And the important plugins we want to check in on are the Aruba Tessalator, make sure that's set to loaded and auto load. Scroll down a bit. We also want to make sure that the ATF or auto desk translator framework plugin is loaded and set to load automatically. And then finally, since we're rendering in Arnold, we want to make sure that the mtoa, or Maya to Arnold plugin is loaded and set to auto load. Next, let's check in on our linear working units. That's in the system preferences. Windows, settings preferences, preferences. And in the settings section, we'll see working units. The working units setting is merely the display units or the units of measurement displayed in Maya. With the default linear working units of centimeters, a 100 centimeter cube's dimensions will be displayed as 100. If you switch the working units to meter, that same cube's attribute values will display as 1.0. I'm going to set this back to the default of centimeter. Regardless of this setting, the size of the scene and the objects within it remain constant. You're just changing how you wish to measure the scene. Internally, Maya assumes a so-called system unit to be a centimeter, and there is no way to change that. Don't worry, the importers for foreign file formats such as cad formats are smart enough to account for differing incoming system units. So, for example, if the system units in your cad file are in millimeters, Maya will do the conversion automatically and your model will come in at a one-to-one scale. And that, of course, is what you want. It's always best to construct your scenes at one-to-one scale, unless you're dealing with special circumstances such as dynamic effects, or very, very large or very, very small scenes. For example, you can't model a scene the size of an entire city at one-to-one scale. You'll have to build a miniature, otherwise you'll have serious problems. But for product shots, one-to-one scale is almost always the best choice. Options in the settings page here are for the current scene only. So if you need to set the working units for new scenes, there's a different window for that. I'll save this current scene's options. If you do want to change the setting for future scenes, you can go into file, new scene, options. And in here, you'll see a switch that says do not reset working units. And what that does is it makes the preferences option that we saw in the other page sticky for future scenes and it also causes the current setting to become the new setting forever. In other words, Maya will inherit the setting from any scene that you load. So anytime you load a scene, that scene's working units become the default for all new scenes if this switch is on. For example, if you load a scene that's set to a working unit of foot, then all future scenes will be set to foot. So when you create a new scene from then on, they'll all be set to foot. That will happen until you load a scene that is set to something else. So this do not reset working units is really problematic and not recommended, so I'm going to leave that off and I'm going to just make sure that all future new scenes are going to default to linear working units of centimeters. We can close out of that dialog without making any changes. I just want to streamline the Maya interface a little bit to clean it up and simplify it for teaching. I'll go into the windows menu, to UI elements and turn off some of these things. I'm going to disable the shelf. I'm also going to disable the time slider and also disable the range slider. I will be using the outliner a lot, so I'll open that up. Windows, outliner, and I can just minimize that panel by clicking on the tab name, here. Just click on outliner and that'll collapse it. I'm going to be using the attribute editor quite a lot so that's over here. I'm going to drag that out and actually size it so I can take up a bit more real estate. And to prevent it from docking again, I'm going to lock the interface. Just click on this little padlock which disables docking and undocking. And then I can set that attribute editor over here and make it really tall so I can see more attributes. I'm going to close that attribute editor, but I can always get that back with the hotkey which is control A. And then just reenable the channel box and layer editor over here. The viewport panel toolbar here is taking up quite a bit of space, so I'm going to hide that as well. There's a keyboard shortcut for that which is control shift M. And finally I want to set up the grid for the current scene. Go into the display menu, to grid options. And contrary to popular belief, this dialog does not display the current state of the grid. This is merely allowing us to set the state of the grid. It's not telling us what the state is. In other words, this doesn't read anything. This is write-only. And, in fact, there is no way for you to know what the current state of the grid is. The only way to know what the current state of the grid is is to set it explicitly. So we're going to do that. I'm going to set the length and width to 50 centimeters and I want a grid line every 10 units and I want to subdivide that major grid line 10 times. So this'll give me a major line every 10 centimeters and a minor line every one centimeter. So I can see the difference between major and minor lines. I'm going to set the axes color to black. Set the grid lines and numbers color to black. And also, I'm going to enable orthographic grid numbers along the edge because we're going to perform some simple modeling operations and I will want to know what I'm measuring. So I want to display those grid numbers. Click apply and close. And we just set up our grid options. We can check that in the orthographic views by tapping the space bar to go to the four viewport layout and now we see we've got our grid numbers here indicating 10 centimeters away from the origin. Okay, we've set up the options for the Maya program and the current scene.