Maya notes on important concepts
MAYA NOTES - Important Concepts
- Maya
- Maya is a high-end de facto standard software package that includes modeling, animation, and rendering.
- Maya is used by all the major commercial animation houses. Most do not depend on it exclusively, but Maya and MEL are valuable skills to have.
- Maya is extremely powerful but also extremely complex - it has a steep learning curve.
- In general, there is more than one way to do anything in Maya.
- MEL
- MEL is Maya's scripting language
- Everything (for the most part) in Maya is implemented in MEL
- It's important to understand how to access object attributes and parameters in MEL - see the notes on MEL for more details.
- As you interact with Maya, you can see the MEL commands that are being executed by invoking the MEL panel.
- Nodes & Attributes
- Everything (for the most part) in Maya is represented by nodes, with attributes, connected to other nodes
- There are two kinds of connections between object nodes:
- scene hierarchy connections: e.g., grouping, parent-child relationships
- input-output connections. For example, the height of one object can be connected to the scale factor of another
- Directed Acyclic Graph
- aka DAG, Scene Graph or Scene Hierarchy
- The graph that shows the scene hierarchy
- Dependency Graph
- aka DG or Input and Output Connections
- The graph that shows attribute dependencies between nodes
- Hypergraph
- Panel to display and edit relationships between nodes in your scene graphically
- Used to show either the DG or the DAG