Preparing for the lessons

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

Make sure you understand the basic concepts of polygon modeling, NURBS curves, animation, and dynamics.
If you have not already done so, download the lesson files from http://www.autodesk.com/maya-tutorials. Copy the Getting Started with Maya 2014 Lesson Files zip file to your local drive and unzip the folder.
Select File > Set Project and set the GettingStarted2014LessonData\nHair directory as your Maya project.
As you work through these lessons, remember to save your work frequently and increment the name of the file every so often (filename1, filename2, and so on).
In this way you’ll have earlier versions of your work to return to should the need arise. Completed scenes for each lesson has been included in the nHair lesson data directory. If you want to see the expected results of the lessons, you can open these scenes. The scene filenames are called nHairLesson1_Finish.mb and nHairLesson2_Finish.mb respectively.
Select Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences. Click Time Slider under Categories and make sure the Playback speed is set to Play every frame. Dynamic animation plays more accurately with this setting.
Select the nDynamics menu set. Unless otherwise noted, the directions in this chapter for making menu selections assume you’ve already selected the nDynamics menu set.