Welcome to Maya, the world’s leading software application for 3D digital animation and visual effects. Maya provides a comprehensive suite of tools for your 3D content creation work ranging from modeling, animation, and dynamics through to painting and rendering to name but a few. With Maya, you can create and edit 3D models in a variety of modeling formats and animate your models using Maya’s suite of animation tools. You can create convincing visual simulations of rigid and soft body objects interacting in the physical world using the computational dynamics and particles tools. Maya also provides a range of tools to allow you to render your animated 3D scenes to achieve photo realistic imagery and animated visual effects

The Maya software interface is fully customizable for those users who require the ability to maximize their productivity. Maya allows users to extend their functionality within Maya by providing access to MEL (Maya Embedded Language). With MEL, you can customize the user interface and write scripts and macros. In addition, a full Application Programmers Interface (API) is available to enhance the power and functionality of Maya. The content creation power of Maya is provided to users in an integrated software application that is designed to enhance user productivity and ease of use.
The goal of this manual is to assist you in getting started with Maya as you embark upon your learning path.
This chapter provides the following information:
• About Getting Started with Maya–Contents of the Getting Started with Maya manual

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