Using the exercise files

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files that I've provided with this course, then download those, extract them and place them in a convenient location, such as on your desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files and you still wish to follow along with the demonstrations, you can do that using your own assets. And in fact, you can even learn in this course by simple observation and note taking in the case that you don't have Maya and After Effects in front of you, for example if you're on a mobile device. However, if you are going to be following along with the exercises, you will either need to have an exercise files folder or another project folder from which to work. So let's set that up in Maya, I've already got that running. So let's go over the process of creating a new project, in the case where you don't have the exercise files. Go to the File menu and choose Project Window. The Project Window shows the current project, which is simply the "default" project in the current user's "Documents\Maya\projects". Let's create a new project from scratch. Click the New button and in current project, give it a name. We'll call it "maya_product_viz", and press Enter. I like to use underscores in the folder name just to avoid any potential problems, because Maya notoriously doesn't like white spaces. We also need to give it a Location. We could put it in the same location as the "default" project, which is in the current user's "Documents\Maya\projects", or we could browse for another location. I can click the browse button and go to the "Desktop" and click Select. Now I'm going to create a new project called "maya_product_viz". It'll be located on the desktop, and it will use the default folder names for all the primary project locations. Click Accept, and now when we go to the File menu and choose Open, we're taken to "Desktop\maya_product_viz\scenes". And now this is our new, empty project. If you do have the exercise files, then you'll want to set Maya to that project folder. In the File menu, choose Set Project and then simply select the folder, which is "Exercise_Files", and click Set. And now when you go to the File menu and choose Open Scene, you're taken to the "Exercise_Files\Scenes" folder. And these are all the scene files I've provided with the course. Okay, I'll cancel out of here. Let's take a deeper look at the exercise files. I'll minimize Maya and open up the "Exercise_Files" folder, and we have a standard Maya project structure, with the addition of an "after_effects" folder. If we go in there we'll see that we've got a few After Effects project files, as well as some source documents and some example renderings. If we go to the "scenes" folder, we'll see all the Maya scenes, and additionally a STEP document which is a CAD file. Generally speaking, there's one scene file per movie, and the scene files sort of flow into one another. These scene files generally represent the beginning state for a particular movie, but they also represent the ending state for the previous movie. So for example, "01_07" is the begin state for that movie, but it's also the end state for "01_06". Some of the scene files come at the end of a process, and these are indicated by the name "finished_example". That scene file represents the end state of that particular movie, but not the begin state of any movie. Additionally you'll see a few of these labeled "gpu", and those are set up for the graphics processing unit, and that's a faster way to render with Nvidia hardware. If you don't have Nvidia hardware then you can open the scene file that does not have the "gpu" suffix on the end of it. If we go to the "images" folder, we'll see some example renderings and each one of these is inside a folder labeled "example" so that you don't have a name clash. During the course of the exercises I'll be asking you to create some folders, for example a folder called "aov_components_draft", and so that you don't get an error message when you attempt to save into that folder, I have appended these folders with the suffix "example". And that way you won't get an error message if you try to render over the top of a file that already exists. Those are the exercise files for this course, so let's get started now by setting up the Maya options.