Autodesk Maya 2016 Tutorials - Introduction to Maya 2016 course, Maya Interface Overview, Hotbox and Marking Menus tutorials progress

So, this month I have revisited learning 2D animation and 3D animation. I am watching 2D animation tutorials with Aaron Blaise with his Fundamentals of Animation course and his Scene Approach course. But, on my own through Youtube video lessons from Todd Palamar. He goes through a very introductory level walk through of Maya. Today, I watched 6 videos. During his course I will learn how to model a character, learn to texture it, rig it, and animate it as well as render it. So, I have decided I am going to model, texture, rig, and animate my cute little creature (as seen below) - Droodle.

Here is what I have learned and gathered. I watched the Introduction to Autodesk Maya 2016 video. In this video he discussed What Maya is how long the program has been out. The next video I watched is what I can expect from the courses he has on learning Maya. His tutorials are going to teach the basic walk through of what Maya can do based on its individual objectives. Our focus is learning the Menu, Modeling, Animation, and Rendering and based on those lessons we will focus on those objectives while learning key ways to utilize Maya for those purposes. Todd Palamar has written books on Maya and has worked in the industry which is awesome. He has written books on how to use Maya such as: Maya Studio Project - Dynamics and he has also written the series - Mastering Maya book series. You can even find his work online and learn more from him at SPeffects.com. Pretty cool stuff!

Then I learned what Maya Help is all about. He taught me how to use those resources where to go and what kind of benefits it can help you learn about. You can even access the Maya Learning Channel. This will be helpful if there are things I want to discover later on or need help learning about that may be more complex than what he is currently showing me.

The next video I watched and learned about was the Maya Interface Overview video. In this video, Todd walked through the Menu sets, He discussed Snapping Tools briefly, Render tools, The view port view, how to access the different views, The channel box and layer editor, the left toolbar and it's functions. He showed me how to hide the layers and re enable them. He showed me the panel layouts and their basic presets. He walked through the Timeline and editing tools and the script editor and output window.

Todd's next video talked about Hotbox and Marking Menus. He taught me the ability to bring up workflow in our work space. He showed me how to use that by using the space bar. He taught me about Hotbox controls and how this function of the menu worked. I love the way he explains Maya he gives an overview without making it too overbearing. He talked about content sensitive menus and I learned the hot keys for zooming closer to an object and the move and rotate tools and their hot keys. These videos have been very beneficial for me. I hope that I can further watch his videos and continue to learn. Next up, I will be learning : About Camera Control, Projects, Nodes and Transformations-Primitive Objects.