This very brief tutorial is intended to familiarise the user with the basic layout of animation tools in Maya. It assumes that the reader will consult help files to find out more about each tool.
1. Channel Editor
2. Layer Editor
3. Shelf
4. Toolbox
5. Timeline
Okay, so Maya looks pretty daunting, especially if you go hunting through all the menus, but from an animation point of view it’s not that hard to use once you know where things are.

Menus
The drop-down box at the top left of the screen lets you choose which set of menus to display. Setting it to ‘animation’ will let you see everything needed for this tutorial.
Navigation
You can navigate your way round the viewport by using the following controls:
To Rotate – hold the Alt key and drag with the left mouse button.
To Zoom – use the mouse scroll wheel or hold Alt and drag with the right mouse button.
To Pan – hold Alt and drag with the middle mouse button.
To focus the camera on an object, hold Ctrl+Alt and drag a selection box around the object.

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