Maya works mainly with meshes, you directly move the points and lines of a object which is good for objects / anything man made where a program like ZBrush is more like modeling a lump of clay, you push and pull on the mesh to create shape, this is good for more organic models.

Select the object.
Press the W key (shortcut for Move Tool).
Press the Insert key (or D key) (turns on Pivot edit mode).
Press and hold down the V key (shortcut for Point Snap), move the Pivot center to the lowest point of your model, once it snaps into place, drop it and release the V key.
Press the Insert key (turns off Pivot edit mode).
Press and hold down the X key (shortcut for Grid Snap), move the object upwards using the Y handle, once it snaps into place, drop it and release the X key.
Go to Modify > Center Pivot

The Tutorial also stressed the Importance of projects, especially if you are going to be moving between computers.

After the “Using brush tools to sculpt meshes” tutorial on LinkedIn Learning I had a play with the sculpting tools and the soft selection tool and changed the appearance of the preset head from the exercise files, nothing special but It did help me get a better grasp of how the tools work and what they can and can’t do, for example I used the ‘Foamy tool’ to lift the vertices on the head to create a kind of horn however it may be better to do this by adding cylinders and modeling them to the desired shape and then using the combine option or Boolean > Union to avoid stretching points too far and getting a jagged or a extremely pointy outcome.

Can also use mesh – combine edit mesh – merge

Target weld and bridging also appears to be a useful tool to connect objects

Some random bits of information I found Interesting

Alt + Shift + D to delete history

I found the ‘Select Inverse’ Option useful Ctrl + Shift + I

F Key to fill selected object to the frame

Edit > Group to group objects

NURBS and Poly
NURBS is constructed of curves patches where Poly is made of flat planes, NURBS can create a curved surface with less information where Poly is more flexible so NURBS would be used for more simplistic objects.

Cones and Cylinders have “Subdivisions Cap” “and Round Cap”

Soft select B key to change radius of soft select for organic modeling

Mesh > Combine and Seperate

holding CTRL unfreezes a frozen segment of a mesh.

Target Weld Under Mesh tools

crease tool to control smoothing

Maestri, G. (2019, January 15). Maya 2019 Essential Training. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/maya-2019-essential-training/
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