Art of illusion

Shelf

The Shelf is located directly below the Status line. The Maya Shelf is useful for

storing tools and items that you use frequently or have customized for your

own use. You can keep the tools and items you use most frequently in a

location that provides handy access. Maya has some of the Shelf items

pre-configured for your use.

Select Create > NURBS Primitives > Interactive Creation to ensure that a

check mark does not appear beside the item.

From the Shelf, select the NURBS sphere icon located at the left end by

clicking on it.

Maya creates a sphere primitive object and places it at the center of the

Maya workspace in the same position as the cube.

Determine if this is the correct tool prior to choosing it by first

placing your mouse cursor over the icon, the name or description of it appears

in a popup window directly over it.

the wireframe outline of the cube you created earlier in

the lesson has changed color to navy blue, and the sphere is displayed in a bright green color. The sphere is now the selected object and the cube is no longer selected. In Maya, when the object displays like this, we refer to it as being selected or active.

Selection of objects and components is a way of indicating to Maya that this particular item is to be affected by the tool or action you will subsequently choose. Working with Maya, you will be selecting and deselecting items a lot. Some numerical information appears in the Channel Box editor on the right

hand side of the user interface. This information relates to X, Y, and Z,

translation, rotation, and scaling for the active object. The X, Y, and Z Translate numerical values are currently set to 0. This indicates that the sphere’s location is at the origin. The Channel Box is useful for viewing and editing this type of basic information.