Using the exercise files

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files I provided with this course, you can go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location, such as on your desktop. If you don't have access to the exercise files, that's okay because you can still follow the tutorials but just use your own assets. And even if you don't have Maya in front of you, for example, if you're on a mobile device, you can still learn by observation and note taking. If you are going to be following the tutorials in Maya, you'll need a Maya project folder, either the exercise files I provided, or a project folder of your own creation. First, let's talk about the exercise files I've provided, it's a standard Maya project folder inside the scenes, where a bunch of Maya ASCII scene files and occasionally, there will be a finished example, illustrating what that tutorial should look like at the end of the movie. If there isn't a finished example, then generally that means that the next file in the sequence represents the end state of that movie. In other words, we have 0105 substance. And that's the begin state for 0105. But we also have 0106 substance output, which is the next one in the sequence, that is the begin state for 0106 but it's also the end state for 0105. So we kind of go in a sequence until we reach a finished example. Additionally, you'll notice that these files are tiny, and that's because I've used referencing, these scenes all reference other scenes inside referenced scenes, we'll see, we've got a couple of larger files, they were simply loaded into these smaller files at the root level of the scenes. Scrolling down to the bottom of the scenes folder, there's also a text file, model credits.txt, I'll double click to open that just to show you, these are the credits for the figure of a dancer model that I've used in the course. I'll close that. Also in that exercise files folder, is a folder labeled source images, and these are all the textures used in the project, there are generally two copies of everything because Arnold automatically generates these .tx mipmap files anytime you render in Arnold. You'll also see some texture files with a suffix labeled example. These are here to avoid any potential of name clashes or error messages, during the process of following the exercises. If you do all the steps in the exercises, you're actually going to be generating files into your exercise files folder. If you created a file that already existed, then you'd get an error message or might have other problems. I provided these files with the suffix example in the file name in order to avoid those potential errors and conflicts. Okay, let's go into Maya and set or create a project folder. Before I do that, I want to declutter the interface and strip it down so that we'll be able to focus on the Hypershade capture editor and the Arnold render view, I'll go into Preferences, Windows, Settings Preferences, Preferences, and the interface category, we're going to disable show panel toolbar, I'll also go into the UI elements section, and disable some of the visible UI elements, I'll turn off the shelf, time slider, range slider, and command line. Now I've got a stripped down interface and I can save my preferences. If you're not using the exercise files, you'll need to create a project. It's done from the file menu, we can choose the project window, and we want to create a new project, our current project is here, which is in the current users documents Maya projects, click New and give it a name, you can call it Maya shader networks or something like that, and choose a location to create as new project, click to browse, just going to go to my desktop. And click select to create and set that project, click Accept. Then if we go into the File menu and choose Open Scene, we're taken to our current projects scenes folder. And that's a Maya shader networks. If you're using the exercise files, then we want to set the project, so let's cancel out of here, go back to the file menu and choose Set Project, and then browse to, in this case, the desktop, choose the root level of the project, which is exercise files, and click set. Then once again, if we go to File, Open Scene, we're taken to the current project scenes folder. All right, that's how to set the Maya project for the course.