To begin any modeling project in Maya, you first have to start with either a polygon or NURBS object. This post will help get you started with the basics of this process.
Creating Objects
Types of Objects
There are two types of objects in Maya: polygons and NURBS.
Polygon Objects - Objects comprised of points in space, called vertices, that are connected by straight edges and flat faces.
NURBS Objects - Objects created using mathematically precise curves with smooth surfaces connecting them
Most often you will be using polygon objects, since NURBS are not ideal for rigging or animation.
Creating an Object
To create an object, go to the Create tab at the top of the Maya window and choose from either Polygon Primitives or NURBS Primitives. When you hover over one of these, you'll notice that each object has a box next to it. This is a common button in Maya, and it's used to access any extra settings that you can change. For objects, this will include parameters like radius, length, width, height, and number of polygon divisions. You can either set these parameters before you create the object and/or change them using the Channel Box in the Inputs section.
You can also quickly create objects by going to either the Polygon or Curves/Surfaces shelves and clicking on the object you want to create.
Also notice that when you use the create menu, there's a checkbox for both polygons and nurbs called Interactive Creation. This means that when you create the object, you can click and drag anywhere in the viewport to create the object at your desired position and scale. Personally, I keep this checkbox turned off at all times, since I can always change those parameters later. Also, by turning this checkbox off, your object will automatically be created at the origin with a scale of 1, which is especially advantageous when modeling a symmetrical object.
Manipulating Objects
The Tool Bar
The tool bar is located on the left side of the Maya window and includes all of the basic tools you will need to select and move objects.
Starting at the top, we have our selection tool and lasso tool. Both of these allow you to select objects, with the lasso tool allowing you to draw a marquee around the objects you want to select in your viewport. With the regular selection tool though, all you need to do is click on the object you want to select. You can also select multiple objects by holding shift and clicking, or you can remove objects from a selection by holding control and clicking. You'll know your object is selected when it turns green.
Next are the move, rotate, and scale tools. (We will be skipping the paint selection tool , since we won't be talking about vertex modeling in these overviews.) You will be using these three tools very frequently in Maya, and I recommend learning the hotkeys, so you can more efficiently access them. These are listed below:
q - selection tool
w - move tool
e - rotate tool
r - scale tool
Manipulating Objects
To use these tools, you just need to click on the object (no need to switch back to your selection tool to do this), and a manipulator will appear around the object's pivot point. This manipulator allows you to move/rotate/scale the object in either one, two, or three axes simultaneously, depending which part of the manipulator you use.
For the move tool, the arrow keys allow you to move the object only in the corresponding axis, with y always being green, x red, and z blue. The squares allow you to move the object in two axes, along the plane in which that square is oriented. Last, the yellow box in the middle allows you to move the object in all axes at once. This is the same as the scale tool, except the scale tool has cubes, rather than arrows, to distinguish it.
The rotation tool similarly has colored rings that allow you to rotate in only one axis. It also has a yellow ring that rotates the object based on your current perspective point. Last, you can rotate in all axes at once by clicking anywhere in the center of the manipulator that isn't on one of the rings.
You can also change the size of your manipulator by using the + and - keys on your keyboard.
The Channel Box
The channel box is an important part of the Maya interface, since it has a lot of the base information about your object. In order to see this information, you have to have your object selected. If your channel box isn't showing up at all, you can also click the channel box button in the upper right hand corner.
The channel box shows the position, orientation, and scale of your object within the scene, relative to the origin. You can manually change these numbers yourself within the channel box and can even change multiple by clicking and dragging along the boxes that you want to select. You can also change the object's name by clicking on it's name in the channel box.
Tool Settings
With all of these tools, you can double click on it to open up the settings. For the purposes of this series, we won't be going into detail with most of these settings, since it gets further into vertex modeling, but the general setting that you should pay attention to is the axis orientation. By default, the move tool will be set to World and the rotation and scale tools will be set to Object. These are the two most commonly used orientation settings. World orientation means that the x, y, and z axes of the manipulator will be oriented in the same direction as the world axes, with y pointing upward. (This is the same orientation as the icon in the bottom left corner of the viewport.) Object orientation, on the other hand, means the manipulator axes will be oriented in the direction of the object's pivot point. This can be useful if you've rotated your object off of the world axis, but want to move it along it's length direction.
Pivot Points
You can change your object's pivot point by hitting the insert key with the object selected and using the manipulator to change it's position and/or orientation. Click the insert key again to get out of this mode.
Organizing Your Objects
The Outliner
The outliner is a great way of finding, selecting, and organizing all of the objects you have in a scene. We won't be getting into all of the details in this overview, but you should be aware that it exists. It's located under the Window's tab in Maya and has a list of all of your objects, cameras, etc. You can move the items in this list around by middle click dragging them around. You can also select your objects from the outliner by clicking on their names.
Layer Editor
The layer editor is located in the bottom right corner of Maya and is used to organize your objects so that they don't get in the way when you have a very heavy scene. To create a layer of objects, select the objects you want to add and click the button on the right to create a layer from the selected objects. (You can also just create an empty layer and/or add objects after the fact by right clicking on the layer.)
Each layer has three button settings next to it. The V stands for visibility and allows you to turn on and off the visibility quickly for every object in that layer. The P stands for playback, and if it's turned off, the object will be hidden when you play your animations in the viewport.
The third, blank button has three settings. When the button is blank, the objects are in their normal mode. But when it's set to T, the objects are in template mode, meaning you can't select them, but you can see their wire frame version within the viewport. The R setting is for reference mode, which means that you can't select the object, but you can see it in what's called smooth shade mode in the viewport.
Last, you can either double click on the layer name or click the slashed box next to it to open the settings and change the name of the layer.
Overview
This was a very dense section, but I highly recommend testing these things out in Maya yourself and having some fun with manipulating objects. Challenge yourself to make a very simple model by piecing together differently positioned, oriented, and scaled objects. This will help you to learn the tools quickly and start to give you an idea of how you might begin creating something in Maya.
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