Preparing for the lessons

To ensure the lesson works as described, do these steps before beginning:

Make sure you understand the basic concepts of modeling NURBS curves, animation, and dynamics. For more information, see Maya Help.
Select the Dynamics menu set.
Unless otherwise noted, the procedures in these lessons assume the Dynamics menu set is selected.
Select File > New Scene to create a new scene before you start each lesson. For those scenes that require you to open a file, the Hair scene files are located in GettingStarted/scenes directory. The GettingStarted directory is installed in the same location as your Maya software application.
Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences. Click Timeline under Categories and make sure the Playback Speed is set to Play every frame. Dynamic animation plays more accurately with this setting.
Also set the playback and animation end times to 10000. This ensures you have lots of time to interact with the playback of the hair simulation.
If you have not already done so, copy the GettingStarted folder from its installation location to your projects directory. Then, set the GettingStarted directory as your Maya project. For more information, see Copying and setting the Maya project in the Getting Started with Maya guide.
We also provide a completed scene for each of the lessons in this chapter. If you want to see the expected results of the lessons, you can open the scenes located in the GettingStarted/Hair directory. The scene filenames end with Finish.mb, for example, hairFinish1.mb.