These tips and tricks should help every animator in maya, whether they are just starting out in the graph editor or they have been animating for years.
Scene Files
To understand project management, you first need to understand scene files. A scene file is your Maya file, which contains all of your object information. This is what's created when you go to File > Save. You'll notice that by default, this will automatically go to a folder called "scenes" probably under another folder called "default". This is part of the Maya project folder structure, which we'll talk about next.
Project Folders
Maya's project management is based on what's called Project Folders. This is where Maya stores your scene files and all of their related files, images, etc.
Maya will automatically create a default project folder for you when you download it. This is most likely located under Documents > maya > projects on a PC. This should have a folder called default with the following sub folders:
assets
autosave
cache
clips
data
images
movies
renderData
scenes
scripts
sound
source images
This is where Maya will store all of your project's files, and you can create new folder structures for every project that you do, in order to keep things organized.
To create a project folder, open Maya and go to File > Project Window. All you need to do it type in a name for your project folder and click create, although you can use this window to customize the sub folders for your project if you choose. This will create your project folders in the same area as the default folder, unless you tell it otherwise. However, I suggest keeping all of your projects in this location, since it makes it easier for Maya to find them when you set your project.
Setting Your Project
In order to optimize your workflow and tell Maya where to find all of the necessary related files, you need to set your project whenever you open a Maya scene. Setting your project tells Maya which project folder you're currently working with, so that it will automatically link up with the files in any sub folders and will know where to save your scene files when you go to File > Save As.
To do this, go to File > Set Project and navigate to the corresponding project folder. (Note: If you've recently set your project to this project folder, Maya should already have this project set for your current scene file.) Now you're all set up and ready to do some projects in Maya!
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