What did I do this time?

I'm very good at breaking things in Maya. Amendment: I'm very good at breaking things. I tend to break everything at some point so it is relatively normal to hear some noise of surprise followed by a sound of anger. Then you will hear some variation of "What the crap happened?", "What did I do?", or "I broke ___". But by breaking things, I learn how solve the randomest problems and learn new things about various programs. I thought that I'd share this knowledge with all of you so you know what to do if you ever encounter problems. Hopefully this will mostly be an example of what NOT to do when trying to Maya. But maybe this will show you aids in various programs that will help you animate better.

This will be an ever-growing post as I will always be messing around in programs and learning new things in different program that help me in animation. I use Maya a ton more than anything else so that will have more information than anything else, but when I use other programs I will update this with hopefully useful information.

Maya Knowledge:

Shortcut: These are shortcuts that you might not know but are really useful if you're lazy like me and plan on using Maya for a really long time.

• If you don't know if something is a shortcut or not, assume that it is and don't press it. I make that mistake a lot and that might be why I have so many problems in Maya.
• KNOW WHERE LETTERS ARE ON YOUR KEYBOARD. This will prevent keyboard shortcut problems.
• Command W: This closes Maya. Make sure you save.
• Command S: This saves your scene.
• D: when using the move tool (I would assume you can do this with the rotate tool and the scale tool as well but i haven't tested that yet) pressing D allows you to be able to alter the way you view the tool.
• Home: in case nobody knew this, the home key allows you to move where the move, scale, and rotate tool are on your meshes and objects.

Editors: There are many editors and pop up menus that can help you animate and model better. Most if not all editors that you will need can be found on your side menu (the place where you find the move tool, rotate tool, etc.). On this side menu you can change how many views you have up, or spacebar. But it doesn't have to be the standard 4 view with top, side, and whatnot. These are the cool ones I discovered that you just might find useful.

• Visor: This is more of a pop up menu than an editor but it is soon COOOL!!!!! It makes me so happy! In this menu you can find many pre-made models. There are humanoid models, animal models, texture models (Example being grass. These models get rid of the need to bump map. These pre-made ones are really nice because they are hard to make, well time consuming not really hard.) They also have bifrost models (Bifrost is like a water model. I haven't messed with bifrost very much. When I do, I'll make a technical tutorial about it for you guys.). There is more in Visor but this is some of it and I fell in love with it!
• Trax Editor: This is where you put sound into Maya and edit it. My guess is that rendering takes a lot longer and when animating there will be a lot of lag. If this is wrong please tell me because that will save me.
• Dope Sheet: This is an editor. Interesting side note, my teacher had no idea what this was either so we went to trusty google. Nutterbutter's guess: a combo of a Microsoft Excel sheet and Maya's Graph Editor. Google sent us to Autodesk's Maya Help page and Autodesk said; Dope Sheet is a way to track keyframes for all objects that move. It looks like an excel spreadsheet so  you can track everything while moving objects in respective views and also in the graph editor. This was a cool discovery.

Random knowledge: This is just stuff I've figured out that may or may not help you I thought were really cool and kinda awesome. Prepare to have your mind blown.

• If you have an unnamed and empty Maya scene open you can drag your scenes into it. I think you'll have to figure out what files Maya will open. And I'm pretty sure Maya 15 opens different files then 14 so please look this stuff up.

Files: I was thinking about files and what Maya 16 can open up. As any good animator would, I looked some stuff up. So far this is what I got.

•  It looks like you can import Cad files over as long as it is in step format. But even then people have had issues. Might not be the best idea to import Cad files into Maya, but if you really want to, please consult the internet for help and not me.
• For Illustrator it looks like it still has to be an illustrator 8 file. I hope there will be a day where Maya will support something else from illustrator but I think we'll have to wait for now.

Photoshop Knowledge:

Shortcuts: These shortcuts save my life when I'm editing images. I edit images mostly for textures and bump maps. But these might actually help 2-D people when they are editing scanned images.

• Command J: This is called jumping. You will need to outline an object or area that you want on a different layer. This jump command copies your selected area and makes a new layer with it.
• Command Shift J: This is another jumping shortcut. But this one doesn't leave your selected area on the original layer. If you want that original layer to be a background layer, you need to fill the space that has been created. This form of jumping is more common than the previous. But both are used.