Maya Beginner Tutorial Series 17/17: Creating and Using Display Layers

Category: Maya

February 24, 2025

The following tutorial series is directly from Module 1 of 3 of "Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course" tutorial course.

I've released this entire Module 1 of 3 completely free. It is focused on teaching you how to get started learning Maya completely from scratch in 4 hours. Start with all videos in order within Maya Beginner Series here.

The full "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" contains 3 Modules and 18+ hours of tutorials.

Module 1 is focused on interface overview for game environment modeling.
Module 2 is focused on environment modeling techniques (27 videos, 8+hrs).
Module 3 is focused on UV mapping and UVing (21 videos, 5+hrs).

Unclutter and organize your large scenes by creating and using Display Layers in Maya. Here is how...

Video Tutorial

Create New Display Layers

2 options for creating layers.

Create an empty layer
Create a layer and place selected objects onto it automatically

Option 1: Create New Layer and Assign Selected Objects

Select which objects you want to place on a display layer.

Then click on Create new layer and assign selected objects icon.

You can then add additional objects into this display layer by right-clicking on the layer and choosing Add Selected Objects:

To remove any object from a display layer, right-click on the layer and choose Remove Selected Objects:

Option 2: Create New Empty Layer

Click on Create new layer icon. This will create an empty layer regardless if you have any objects selected in the scene.

You then place any object into this new empty layer by right-clicking on the layer and choosing Add Selected Objects:

Layer Visibility Options

Click on V icon to hide/unhide placed objects within a layer:

Third box is for preventing selections of objects within that layer.

Empty box: select any object freely
T: displays objects as templates with wireframe only (can't select)
R: displays objects as reference with full shaded view (can't select)

Editing Display Layers

Double-click on the layer name to open Edit Layer menu to rename it:

To move a display layer up or down to change the order, use the up/down icons:

To delete a layer, right-click on the layer icon and choose Delete Layer:

Deleting the layer does NOT delete objects inside that layer, just the layer itself.

To open up the menu for any display layer you either double-click on the layer or click the forth box icon:

You can then assign a color for any display layer to help you color-code the objects within that display layers:

Maya Foundation: Home-Study Course

Learn how to environment model and UV with Maya better than anyone else. Become a modeling master with it. In "Maya Foundation: Home Study Course" I will show you how.