From the course: Introduction to 3D

Viewports and navigation in Maya

From the course: Introduction to 3D

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Viewports and navigation in Maya

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- [Instructor] Now let's take a look at how to navigate our viewports in Maya. Navigation in Maya is fairly straightforward, all we have to do is one keyboard key and a mouse button. So, the keyboard key is going to be the Alt key on a Windows keyboard, or the Option key on a Macintosh keyboard. So we're going to hold down Alt or Option and then left click. Left click allows you to tumble the camera. Middle click allows you to pan. Right click allows you to dolly the camera, in other words, move the camera in and out. You can also roll the middle mouse button if you have it, to do another type of dolly. So for dolly, you can do Alt or Option + right click or just roll that middle mouse wheel. So once you get the hang of it, navigation in Maya is fairly straightforward. Now, we are navigating in a viewport. In this case, we're navigating in a perspective viewport which is a 3D viewport. If I go over to my layouts here, and click the four view, you'll see that we have other types of layouts, we have a top, front, and side view. Now, those are 2D views, and those are essentially orthographic views on our scene. Now I'm going to show you another trick and that's to hit the Spacebar, so if I hover my mouse over one of these windows and hit the Spacebar, that window becomes full screen. If I hover over it again and hit my Spacebar, I go back to that four view. So if I hover over this front view, for example, I can, again, use my Alt or Option key to middle click, to pan, and right click to zoom, but if I left click to tumble, I can't do that. And that's because this is a 2D, or an orthographic, viewport. So I'm going to go ahead and select my perspective view here. And let's go through some of the options that we have for viewports. Now, every viewport in Maya has this menu system as well as these icons which control how the objects display. In the view menu, you can see that we can control how we view and frame our selections. Shading controls how the objects appear, so if I were to select wireframe, notice how the hotkey for that is 4, I get wireframe. Now, if I hit the hotkey of 5, I shade the objects, 6 adds textures, 7 adds realistic lighting. Now I can control all of this through the shading and lighting menu as well, so I can use default lighting or use all lights, I can also turn hardware texturing on or off via the menus. But I like four, five, six, and seven, because it's a lot easier. Now we also have menus that allow you to turn off and on objects by type. We also have an option that controls how these render. Now, I have this on viewport 2.0, which is essentially this view here. And it's close to final rendering but it's not quite there. If we want to we can turn on the Arnold viewport, and when we do we may get this menu here. All I have to do is press the play button, and now this renders as if it were, final rendering, so this as close to final rendering as it will get because we're using the same renderer, the Arnold renderer, to render this viewport. So you're going to get very accurate rendering using this method. Now, this method may be a little bit slower because it does rely on the CPU and the GPU to calculate these. So I'm going to go ahead and close this and go back to viewport. Now, I like to use viewport for most of my work and then when I get down to final rendering, I'll switch over to Arnold. Now we can also change the type of panel. Now, I have this as a perspective view, but if I wanted to, I could change it to any other type of panel. Now a lot of these functions are duplicated along this toolbar here, so I can do things such as turn on or off the grids, I can turn on or off things such as, film gates, resolution gate, and so on. I can turn on a field guide, I can also change my display modes here. I can also do shaded with textures which allows me to see the actual geometry over my objects. And then I have some additional controls here for smoother shading, we can also do motion blur, and then we can do stuff like anti-aliasing. So navigation in Maya is very straightforward, it's just the Alt or Option key plus your mouse buttons. And then you can control how your viewport displays as well as which viewports are displaying.

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