Just as the driver of an automobile is familiar with the dashboard of their vehicle, it is important for you to become familiar with the Maya “dashboard.”

The Maya user interface refers to everything that the Maya user sees and operates within Maya. The menus, icons, scene views, windows, and panels comprise the user interface.

Through the Maya user interface you access the features and operate the tools and editors that allow you to create, animate, and render your three dimensional objects, scenes, and effects within Maya.

As you spend time learning and working with Maya, your knowledge of and familiarity with the user interface will increase until it becomes second nature.

In this lesson you learn how to:

• Start Maya on your computer.
• Use the Maya interface so that you can begin to understand where and how to access the critical tools to get started with Maya.
• Select the menu and icon sets within Maya.
• Learn the names of tools related to the icons in Maya.
• Create a new scene view.

This first lesson contains additional explanations of the tools and concepts compared to many of the lessons later in this manual. We suggest you take some time to review these explanations as they lay the foundation for understanding where things are in Maya.