Maya provides many organizational features to help you manage complex scenes. These features include tools to aid selection
in dense scenes, organize the items directly in your working scene, segment a scene into smaller parts, and increase performance.
Selecting objects in a complex scene
Selecting items can be difficult in a complex scene due to overlapping geometry that can obstruct your view. In Maya there
are a number of ways to simplify this process.
- The shows the hierarchy of all objects in the scene as an indented list where child nodes are indented under their parent node.
Useful for quickly navigating through the objects in the scene given that you know the objects’ hierarchy and names.
lets you filter the nodes shown in the Outliner by various classifications such as , , and . You can show different combinations of classifications. You can use the option to store your filter in case you need to sort by the same criteria again.
- When viewing the scene from certain angles, objects may obscure each other making it difficult to select the object you want.
Maya offers a number of different options to deal with this scenario.
- – Lets you display only the selected items in the scene view. Useful to temporarily remove objects which may obstruct your
view of the specific components you want to work with.
You can use Isolate Select by selecting a set of components and selecting .
- – When you click a space in the scene view that corresponds to overlapping objects a marking menu will appear listing these
objects. You can then select the appropriate object from the marking menu. Useful as an alternative to modifying the scene
when trying to select obscured objects.
You can turn on the by selecting the option in in the section.
- – When performing a marquee select over a model that contains multiple component types, Maya will select all the components
of a single type within the marquee. You can modify the order that these components are chosen by modifying their order in
the . Useful when you want to select all the components of a single type within a marquee.
You can modify the Selection Priority by selecting in the section.
- Templating – Lets you make a group of objects unselectable while retaining a wireframe reference of them in the scene. Useful
when you do not want to accidentally modify an object, but still need to see it for reference purposes.
Organizing objects
In a scene you may want to associate related objects together. You can accomplish this in a number of ways.
- – Lets you perform basic selection and transformations on a collection of objects as if they were one without actually combining
the meshes. For more information see Group objects together.
- – A set is collection of objects which can be transformed and selected as one without altering the hierarchy of the scene.
A partition is a collection of exclusive sets such that no object can be contained in multiple sets within the same partition.
For more information see Sets and partitions.
- – A collection of objects which are transformed and selected individually. You can make layers invisible which reduces the
amount of objects in your scene that may obscure your view. You can also template or reference a layer making all the objects
within it unselectable but still present in the scene. For more information see Organize objects on display layers.
- - You can assign any object to multiple layers with a different material on each layer. This lets you create multiple images
for each frame, from any combination of Maya's renderers. For more information see Render layer overview.
- - A collection of nodes represented by a single container node. You can publish a subset of attributes from the internal
nodes to the container node.
Increasing Performance
When working with complex scenes interactive performance can slow down. There are a number of ways to remedy this problem.
Reducing File Size
Scenes containing a lot of geometry require a lot of hard disk space. Maya provides options for replicating existing objects
or dividing up your scene that can help keep your file sizes small.
- Instancing – Lets you create multiple copies of a single object with individual transform nodes. Since they are copies and
not considered actual geometry, the memory and computing power required to render the scene is close to that of rendering
only the original object.
- File Referencing – Lets you assemble objects from multiple files into a single scene without actually importing them. Instead,
these objects are referenced from their native files. This is useful when you want multiple people to collaborate on a single
scene.
