good tutorial?
 

hey i signed up to this website hoping for some good FREE tutorials for people who have never used maya or any other 3d program and assumes you don't know what or where any of the tools are. i really would love to buy tutorials but i simply cant afford to, i only get £10 a week EMA and need that for travel expenses, please link me to a tutorial that matches my criteria, on this website or any other, thanks

Just check out the free tut section, it should help you out a lot!

what one should i do? the basic human form one?

basic human form is good, it depends on what you want to do.. I started off with the human form and then the dog, then I just started buying.

Well, to start out that one and the dog one. Then do the rest, if you're interested.

If you run into any problems check out the help (F1) files and do the search.

Welcome to the SM community.
:beer:

thanks i'll do them two first, i wouldn't of found this site if not for maya's wikipedia article :D

i would definately make sure you have done all the video files which come with maya if you havnt already

umm i got stuck right at the start of the human for tutorial because he is using and older version than me(i have 2008)

i thought i could maybe make sense of it but you know on the top left drop down menu where you choose animation, polygons, surfaces, dynamics, rendering...etc he said set that to modelling but that option isn't there, also when he made a plane his had loads of lines but mine was just one sqaure so i didn't know what to do.

It is unfortunate for you the since Maya 8.0 the menus have been changed and of course unless a tutorial is brand spanking new it will not feature Maya 2008.
All is not lost though as all of the tools are still available in Maya if not is exactly the same place but if you hit F1 on your keyboard you can type the tool in the search of the help documents and find out where it is.

The basic menu changes were as follows:

The Modeling menu set was split into two and became Polygons for Polygon modeling and Surfaces for Nurbs modeling.

Polygon became Mesh
Edit Polygon became Edit Mesh

As far as the extra lines on the plane that is just a creation option and if you click on the little box next to create plane you can specify how many slits in each direction and how large the plane should be before creation or you can simply adjust the values in the chanel box to the right of the screen after the creation but before modifying the geometry.

Hope this clears things up a little for you .

thanx man i will try the tutorial again, are there ways to change maya so it uses less memory? it is most likely my memory since i only have 512MB ram but maya can run slow on my pc a lot of the time

It is recomended that you have at least 512mb of Ram to run Maya so yes as the scen size gets more complex it will slow down and to be honest if you try to render a really complex scene or something with large texture sizes you will find it very difficult unless you have more ram.

ok i will put up with it for now i guess, i have ran into another problem, i got up to were i have to drag the new lambert thing i made with "frankyfrontimage" and like he said would happen, the picture never showed so i did what he said and pressed 5 and it went into shade view and then pressed 6 but the image still didn't show for me, is this to do with me using 2008 as well?

EDIT: oh i figured it out i had to right click my image and go to "assign existing material"

no nothing to do with 2008, open the hypershade and right click on the shader and click on select objects with material and make sure the material is actually on the object ( it should highlight), if it is then hit ctrl +a on the keyboard to open the attribute editor and try reloading the texture on to the material because sometimes it can be a little quirky.

thanx, i fixed the problem but i know one more keyboard shortcut now ;)

(i edited my previous post explaining what i had to do)

where is xray? he said go to shading then xray but i dont have shading