Using the exercise files - Maya Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files I've created for this course, you can go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location. I've placed them here on my Windows desktop. Let's take a look at what's in the exercise files and in a moment we'll set Maya to point to this project. This is a standard Maya project folder. Most of the subfolders are actually empty. The important folders here are scenes and sourceimages. In the sourceimages folder we'll find all of the textures and environment maps for the various scenes. You'll also see that there are .tx files in here. These are automatically generated by Arnold. And I've included them here in order to speed up your load and render times. In the scenes folder we have a bunch of Maya ASCII scene files. Generally there is one scene file per movie that represents the state of that movie at the beginning of the exercise. In a few cases there's also a finished example that illustrates the end state of that exercise. You'll notice that these scene files are very very small. And that's because they're referencing another scene in order to save disk space. In the referenced_scenes folder I've got a larger scene file that's about 35 megabytes in size. And it's being loaded or referenced into the scenes for each movie. Scrolling down to the bottom of the list there's also a text file down here. model_credits.txt Open that up. These are the credits for the stock model that I've used for the exercises. It's called Figure of a Dancer. The artist was Agathon Leonard. And the model was provided by the Smithsonian Institution. It's downloadable from sketchfab.com. All right, let's go into Maya. I've got that minimized. The first thing I want to do is strip down the interface a bit because we're not going to be using most of these UI elements. I'll go into Windows. Settings Preferences, Preferences. Go into the UI Elements, I'm going to turn off a lot of this stuff. Turn off the Shelf, the Time Slider. The Range Slider, the Command Line. And also in the main Interface category, I'm going to turn off the title bar in the main window. Just to save a little bit more space. Okay I'll click Save to save those preferences. I also want to hide the toolbar in the viewport. And that can be done with a keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + M. Now I've got a stripped down interface that's appropriate for teaching a very focused area of Maya, which is advanced materials. Now we're ready to set up our project. If you're not following along with the exercises. For example if you don't have Maya installed or if you're on a mobile device. You can still learn by observation and note taking. If you don't have the exercise files you can still follow along with the demonstrations using your own assets. In that case, you'll want to create a project for the course. You can do that from the menus. Go to File. Project Window. In the Current Project field click the button labeled New. And give it a name like advanced_materials. And press Enter. It will be stored in the default location which is your current user's Documents/maya/projects. Of course you can navigate to some other location if you want. Just click Accept. And you've created new project folder. If you're going to be using the exercise files I provided, you'll want to set Maya to that project folder. Go into the File menu once again, and choose Set Project. And navigate to the Desktop in my case and just choose the root level. The folder labeled Exercise_Files. And click Set. And then when we go to the File menu and choose Open Scene, we're taken to our current project's scenes folder. And that's how to set up the exercise files for the course.