Maya Under the Hood

This chapter provides an understanding of many details of how the pieces of a scene work together, details that the Maya user interface works hard to hide. It relates these details to what a Maya animator sees in the interface when working without scripting. Every part of a scene, whether it is 3D geometry, animation, an expression relationship, a light, a texture, or the arguments that are used to create an object with history, is represented as one or more nodes, or, more completely, dependency graph or DG nodes. Each node has a set of attributes, each of which stores a characteristic of the thing the node represents. All of these nodes together with all of their connections are called the dependency graph or the scene graph. One useful source of information about DG nodes is Maya's Node and Attribute Reference, which is available from the Help menu. Attributes themselves have characteristics that control how one can manipulate them. Attributes may be locked, which prevents them from being changed. It describes the use of the Outliner, the Hypergraph, and the Connection Editor to examine how nodes fit into the dependency graph and the transform hierarchy. It also shows how common tasks, such as creating objects, setting animation keyframes, and modeling NURBS surfaces, change the dependency graph.