From the course: Maya 2024 Essential Training

Working with the Outliner - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2024 Essential Training

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Working with the Outliner

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- [Narrator] It always helps to stay organized in Maya and one place you can do that is in the Outliner. Now, the Outliner is a window that shows up on the left side of the interface. And by default, this is where it will live. Now, you may not have Maya configured so that it shows up that way, and so it may show up as a floating window and that's another great way to use it. You can certainly put it on a second screen if you want to do it that way. And if you are not seeing the Outliner at all, you can always go into Windows, Outliner, and that will bring up the floating window and you can left-click and drag and drag that title bar over. So you get that bright blue line, let go, and it's docked. Now, the Outliner itself just has a list of everything that's in the scene. So here I have my blimp. If I left-click on that, I can select it. If I select this object, I select the tower. Now you'll notice we have a number of different objects in the scene, and some of these are grayed out, so that just means they're hidden. They're still in the scene. We just can't see them in the view ports. Now, I can also select objects by holding down the Shift key. So if I select this one here and hold down Shift and maybe select one a little bit further down, you'll see I can select everything in that list, or I can hold down Control and select them individually. Now, you'll also notice that each one of these has an icon attached to that. Now, Maya has a lot of different icons and you'll learn these as you move through Maya, but these ones here are cameras. You'll see the ones with the kind of checker pattern. So for the blimp, that's geometry. This one here with the arrow is what's called a group. And so that just is an empty object that contains other objects. So if I hit the plus sign here, you'll see that I have what's called a hierarchy. So this object lights basically just contains all of the different spotlights, and they have their own little icons. So you'll see we also have this for the blimp. So if I left-click on that plus sign, you'll see I have a number of objects below that. So I have the gondola, I have the new cells with the propellers. So if I keep opening these up, you can see I can get all the way down to the individual propellers. I also have the tails. So if I select the blimp itself and move it, everything in that hierarchy will move. Now, another thing you can do in the Outliner is you can rename objects. So if I select, say, the blimp and double click on it, I can change the name. So let's just go ahead and type in the letter A and call it blimp A. Now, I can also do this in the channel box. So if I'm over here in the channel box, I can click on that name, and again, just type whatever name I want. Now, the Outliner can also filter by type of objects. So under display, we can show what types of nodes we want to see. And more importantly, under the show, we can show different types of objects. So if I were to say select lights, it'll show just the lights in the scene. If I go over to show objects, cameras, it'll add in the cameras. Now if I want to see everything, all I have to do is select Clear below. So the Outliner is a great way to view everything in your scene, as well as a great place to be organized in Maya.

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