Chapter 1

Working in Autodesk Maya

The Autodesk® Maya® working environment has evolved to accommodate both the individual artist as well as a team of artists working in a production pipeline. The interface presents tools, controls, and data in an organized fashion to allow you to bring your fantastic creations to life easily.

Understanding the way Maya organizes data about the objects, animations, textures, lights, dynamics, and all the other elements contained within the 3D environment of a scene is essential to understanding how the interface is organized. Maya uses what’s known as the Dependency Graph to keep track of the various packets of data, known as nodes, and how they affect each other. Any single element of a Maya scene consists of ...

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