Maya Help overview

The Maya Help is accessible from the Help menu of Maya. The Maya Help appears in your Web browser and gives you complete access to the online documentation of Maya, including What’s New, User Guide, Learning Resources, complete Commands, Nodes, and API documentation, as well as documentation supplied by mental images on mental ray for Maya.

The left-hand navigation frame gives you tabbed access to Contents, Index, Search, and Favorites. Help information appears in the right-hand frame. When you first open the Maya Help, a legend appears in the right side frame, showing the various information types of the Maya Help.

Navigation buttons are available on the top of the right-hand frame. These include:

You can click Please send us your comment about this page at the bottom of each page, to send an email to Maya documentation about the current page.

There are also Index, Search, and Favorites pages that you can access by clicking the appropriate button in the left panel.

Index

The index provides you with an alphabetical list of key points in the documentation. Clicking any of the keywords in the index displays the appropriate subject in the right panel.

You can search the index by typing a query into the textbox at the top of the left panel. When you click the View button, the left panel automatically scrolls to the first instance of the queried keyword, whose page is then displayed in the right panel. You can click the Next button to move to subsequent instances.

You can search through the documentation for words or combinations of words using the search menu. Type your query into the textbox and click the Search button. Matches are ranked according to the number of occurrences of the keyword(s) and are listed from the highest rank to the lowest. Search also has a number of options.

Search Method: Defines whether to find topics containing any of the keywords (or) or all of the keywords (and).
Match case: Considers upper or lower case when searching.
Highlight: When on, all instances of the keyword(s) are highlighted in the result pages.
Find whole words only: When on, the search does not consider partial matches. For example, when Find whole words only is on, if you search for the keyword model, modeling does not match.

Favorites

Displays a list of pages you’ve designated as favorites using the Add to Favorites button. You can remove a favorite page at any time by selecting the page and clicking the Remove selected from Favorites button.