Art of illusion

cursor over any transformation tool icon you see the name of the tool appear

next to the mouse cursor. The tool’s name also appears in the Help Line at the bottom of the Maya

window. The Help Line has an additional purpose: it displays summary

instructions as you use tools that require several steps.

The Channel Box

The Channel Box is an editing panel that provides you access to an object’s

transformation information and much more. It provides information on three

distinct areas for any type of object: The transform node, shape node, and

input node. Nodes are where information about object types are kept track of within Maya.

Nodes are comprised of attributes.

Attributes refer to information related to

what the node is designed to accomplish. In this case, information about the

primitive cylinder’s Y axis rotation is referred to as the Rotate Y attribute. You

will learn more about nodes later in this tutorial.

When you moved and rotated the cylinder primitive using the Move Tool,

you were doing this by your own visual judgement. This will usually be

sufficient for many of your creative applications.

If you need to control the attribute of an object with more accuracy you can

do this by entering the precise values into the appropriate attribute field of

the Channel Box.

In the Channel Box, adjust the attribute values so they match the above

image by clicking in the field and entering the correct numerical values.

This accurately positions the base in your Maya scene.

Maya named the cylinder primitive when it was first created. Rename

the cylinder to something more meaningful to your project.