The following tutorial series is directly from Module 1 of 3 of "Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course" tutorial course.
I've released this entire first Module completely free. It is focused on teaching you how to get started learning Maya completely from scratch in just 4 hours.
The full "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" contains 3 Modules and 18+ hours of tutorials.
In this very important tutorial you'll learn how to set up your grid and create objects to correct size, scale and dimensions.
Base dimensions in Maya are set to centimeters (cm).
To check if that's true, go to Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences and go to Settings:
So if you create a cube in Maya and set it's Width, Height, Depth to 100 in the Inputs Box:
The cube will be 100x100x100cm.
Every prop and every environment asset will have a specific size in the real world. All you do is match that size in Maya. This allows you to create everything in Maya to correct scale and dimensions.
You need an object in your scene to help you judge proportions and dimensions of all props and environment assets you create.
A simple cube that matches and average human dimensions is a good starting point.
Average height of a human figure is about 6 feet, which is 180cm tall. It's actually 182cm but we'll rounded down to make things easier.
So create a cube and give the following dimensions to create a human reference scale:
Always create this human reference cube in all your scenes. This will help you build environments and props to correct dimensions. Use this cube to judge proportion of your scenes to human reference cube scale.
You now need to adjust the default grid to match the scale of objects in the scene. You do this through Maya Grid options.
In Maya go to Display and Grid Options. Set up the following properties:
Enable Heads-Up Display so you can see your scenes poly count.
Go to Display > Heads Up Display and enable Poly Count:
Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 9/17: Saving, Opening and Starting New Scenes
Learn environment modeling. Pick Maya go all in. Learn how to model and UV with it better than anyone else. Become a modeling master with it. In "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" I will show you how.
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