Maya Tutorial: 3D Navigation and Movement

Here's my youtube tutorial for Maya 2018, looking at 3D navigation and movement. It's slightly tongue in cheek so don't take it too seriously... but sometimes you have to make sure that people pay attention.

Full script below- with, a couple of edits...

Here, we see the cube inside it’s  native environment, Maya 2018.
Now because we’re in a 3D environment- we have 3 dimensions to play around in. Let’s press CTRL + SPACEBAR to make the viewport larger and get a better look at this cube.

So we have the X, Y ,Z axis. If we click on our majestic  cube, with the move tool- Shortcut (W for whiskey) we can see three arrows to represent those Axis, X- is red, Z is blue and Y is green.
So X is side to side, Y is up and down and Z is forwards and back. If you click the blue outlined square  in the middle of the move tool you’ll unleash total chaos and have free movement across any axis because we’re in three  dimensions, however this only moves the cube- not our ‘camera’, so lets look at getting up close and personal with the love box.

Hold ALT key down and left click and hold and you’ll be able to tumble around. Don’t get dizzy. Now keep the ALT button firmly held down and click and hold middle mouse and you can pan around, up down and side to side. Finally- I hope your finger isn’t tired on the ALT key because if we hold ALT and right mouse button and drag forwards and backwards we can zoom in and out. If you ever lose the cube in the infinite 3D soulless void inside Maya, press ‘F’ and you’ll snap back to the cube. Just note These only ever move the camera and not the cube!

Now we have several different views in which we can see our cube, we’ve been in perspective 3D view but we have orthographic, 2D views too. So let’s go to the quick panels on the  left side just below the Edge loop tool and select the one with 4 boxes. This cube has never looked so damn beautiful. We can see it in three separate 2D views, each representing one axis- and the perspective view. If you want to – you can hit SPACE while your mouse is in any of the view boxes to make them full screen. Hit SPACE again to go back to the four boxes.

To re-cap we’re playing in 3D now so we have three separate axis of movement and navigation to consider.  We can move and edit our cube without moving the camera. To move the camera
Hold ALT+ Left mouse button to tumble or orbit
Hold ALT+ Middle mouse button to Pan
Hold ALT+ Right mouse button to Zoom in and out.
If you lose your selected object hit ‘F’ to snap the camera back and centre your camera on the object. 

But we can also Move our object in 3D space with the shortcut W across any of the 3  X,Y or Z Axis- without moving the camera.  
CRTL+SPACE will let you maximise the viewport and hide any tool-bars, press them again to bring the bars back.
We don’t just have 3D views, we can use orthographic views too, for each axis.