ACU Maya cheat sheet

Maya scene files use the .mb (binary) or .ma (ASCII) extension; .ma is human-readable and diff-friendly, .mb loads faster and is smaller.

Transforms are stored as a 4x4 matrix decomposed into translate (T), rotate (R), scale (S), plus shear; world matrix = parent world matrix x local matrix.

Pivot point defines the origin for rotation and scale; Modify > Center Pivot moves the pivot to the bounding box center without moving the object.

Freeze Transformations sets current T/R/S to zero and bakes the offset into the object's geometry or parentOffsetMatrix, so the transform values read 0,0,0.

Attribute Editor tabs: transform node holds T/R/S; shape node holds geometry data; history nodes upstream feed the shape via the construction history.

Outliner shows the DAG hierarchy; Display > Shapes toggles whether shape nodes appear as children of transforms.

Hotbox: hold Space for marking menus; tap Space to switch between the four-pane and single active view.

Namespace separates objects with the same short name; Reference (File > Create Reference) loads another scene read-only and can be unloaded or replaced.

Channel Box holds keyable numeric attributes; Locked attributes are greyed, and non-keyable attributes appear only in the Attribute Editor.

Polygon vs NURBS vs subdivision: polygons are faceted and directly editable, NURBS are mathematically smooth surfaces with UV parameter space, subdivision surfaces smooth a polygon control cage.

Quad-dominant topology deforms predictably under rigs; triangles and n-gons concentrate pinching and unpredictable smoothing, especially around joints and the mouth.

Extrude, Bevel, Bridge, and Multi-Cut are the core polygon tools; Insert Edge Loop adds evenly spaced loops and stops at non-quad boundaries.

Smooth Mesh Preview (key 2) displays a smoothed approximation without altering the base cage; key 1 returns to the cage, key 3 to full-resolution smooth mesh.

Combine merges selected meshes into one mesh node but keeps separate shells; Merge (target weld) collapses selected vertices into one point.

Boolean operations (union, difference, intersection) create new topology; check resulting n-gons and clean with Mesh > Cleanup before deforming.

Non-manifold geometry includes edges shared by more than two faces, holes, and isolated vertices; Mesh > Cleanup reports and removes these.

NURBS revolve and loft build surfaces from curves; rebuild curves (Rebuild Curve) to control the number of control vertices before lofting.

UV mapping projects the 3D surface to 2D texture space; UV Editor unwraps shells, and Automatic Mapping projects from multiple planes for organic shapes.

UV shells must not overlap when baking normal or ambient occlusion maps, because overlapping shells write to the same texel region.

Standard surface shader inputs: base color, metalness, specular roughness, and normal map; metalness 0 is dielectric, 1 is metal.

File texture nodes sample image files; place2dTexture controls repeat UV, offset, and rotate for tiling.

Normal maps encode surface direction in tangent space; the green channel convention differs between DirectX (Y down) and OpenGL (Y up), so flip green when mismatched.

Bump maps derive normals from a grayscale height; they are cheaper than normal maps but cannot represent silhouette detail.

Texture reference objects (Create > Texture Reference Object) let a deforming mesh keep a static UV layout for painting or baking.

Forward kinematics rotates joints down the chain; inverse kinematics solves joint rotations from an end-effector goal position.

IK handle types: Single-Chain (SC) solver and Rotate-Plane (RP) solver; RP uses a pole vector to control the bending plane.

Skinning binds geometry to joints; smooth skin weights blend multiple joints per vertex, rigid skin binds each vertex to one joint.

Set Driven Key creates attribute-driven relationships: choose a driver attribute, set keys, and record driven values at each key.

Graph Editor curves use tangents (auto, spline, linear, stepped) to control interpolation; stepped holds the value until the next key.

Animation constraints: point, orient, scale, and parent constraints blend targets with weighted influences.

The Time Slider shows playback range; the Range Slider shows the working range used by playback and rendering.

Bake Simulation samples animated constraints and IK into per-frame keyframes on the selected joints.

Arnold is the default renderer in recent Maya; Render Settings > Arnold holds sampling, ray depth, and motion blur controls.

Arnold sampling: camera (AA) samples control overall noise; diffuse, specular, and transmission samples control indirect bounces.

Ray depth limits how many times a ray can bounce; too low a value darkens reflections and refractions.

Light types: point (omni), directional (sun-like parallel rays), spot, area, and Arnold mesh lights; area lights give soft shadows from a shape.

Physical sky (aiSkyDomeLight) drives sun position and sky color from a directional vector; adjust intensity for exposure.

Render passes (AOVs) split output into diffuse, specular, shadow, and depth channels for compositing.

Motion blur settings: keyframe vs deformation blur, plus shutter angle and shutter open/close offsets.

Playblast renders viewport frames to a movie for quick animation review without final-quality lighting.