The Maya interface
Now that Maya is running, you first need to understand what you are seeing. There are a lot of items displayed in the Maya user interface. The best way to begin is to learn the fundamental tools and then learn additional tools as you need them. Begin by learning some of the main tools.

The Maya workspace
The Maya workspace is where you conduct most of your work within Maya. The workspace is the central window where your objects and most editor panels appear. When you start Maya for the first time, the workspace displays by default in a perspective window, or panel. There are the other components of the default perspective view panel:
- The panel is labeled persp at the bottom to indicate that you are viewing the Maya scene from a perspective camera view.
- The panel has its own menu bar at the top left corner of the panel. These menus allow you to access tools and functions related to that specific panel.
- The grid is displayed with two heavy lines intersecting at the center of the Maya scene. This central location is called the origin. The origin is the center of Maya’s 3D world, and with all object’s directional values measured from this location.

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