Panel Background Color
 

Sometimes the default grey color of the panel background makes it hard to see things you need. Sure you can change the shade in color preferences window, but a quicker way is to use ALT + B. This key combination will cycle through three shades; black, a medium gray and a light gray. The grid color will also change. Image below shows the variations in shades for the ALT + B shortcut. The image was edited to show all three shades in the scene at once.

Note: I think this shortcut is only for versions 6 and above...

Move/Rotate/Scale Tool
 

Most users are already familiar with Maya's move, rotate, and scale tools and their associated hotkeys (W, E, R). But another transform tool exist that combines all three functions in one handy manipulator. This is the Move/Rotate/Scale Tool and is located under Modify>Transformation Tools>Move/Rotate/Scale Tool. Place this tool on your custom shelf or create you're own hotkey (mine is mapped to F7). Switching modes is now as easy as clicking on the appropriate manipulator handle; arrows for moving, circle for rotating, and the boxes for scaling.

This thread is now sticky. :D

And not a moment too soon in my opinion. :D

Speeding up your renders
 

As some of you may or may not know. When you start a batch render you don't need to have Maya open. In fact you'll get your renders done a whole lot quicker with it closed.

However, if your not using your pc you can get it to go a little bit faster by doing the following.

Get up your Task Manager open (Pressing Ctrl --> Alt --> Delete) and go into the Processes tab.

Click 'Mem Usage', this will make Task Manager list all the processes running on your machine in order of the memory that they are taking up. Mayabatch should be pretty high up there (if not at the top).

Right click on 'mayabatch' ---> Set Priority ---> High.

This will make windows give the memory priority to mayabatch, but watch out, while it is set to high everything else will grind to a halt so it's best to do this when your not using it (i.e overnight).

Hope this helps people out. :D

Menus in Maya
 

Maya has loads of of quick menus to help you out. Holding down the space bar being the most common.

However if your having problems selecting faces etc with the normal methods then this next tip might be useful to you.

Hold down 'O' and left click, then move your mouse over 'Selection'. Chose what you are trying to select. This will give you a paint tool to 'brush' over your object. To alter the radius just press and hold 'B' and drag with the left mouse button pressed.

Selecting faces
 

If you sometimes have problems selecting faces and the last tip doesn't take your fancy then maybe this will help.

If you goto Window --> Settings/Preferences --> Preferences and goto the 'Selection' tab and change 'Poloygon Selection' from 'Center' to 'Whole Face'.

What this will do is stop you having to search for those little blue boxes in the the center of the face and instead you can click anywhere on the face and select it.

Hope this helps :D

Rendering in Wireframe
 

This is a little tip that helped me make a fairly good effect for my showreel (even though im still working on it :confused:).

Ever wanted to have a piece of video blend between wireframe and full glory with a cherry-on-the-top render?

It's easer than you think. Just render your animation as normal then select your objects (I only know how to do this for polygon objects, sorry) then open the UV Texture Editor and get it as big as you can.

Make sure 'Image' --> 'Display Images' is off and then take a screenshot.

Load it into your favorite paint program, alter the colours how you want. Then save the file.

Then go back into Maya and use this file as your texture. Then render your animation with the new wireframe textures on your objects.

So now you have two pieces of animation, all you have to do now is load then into something like Adobe Preimere and play around with the opacity till you get the desired effect.

Below is the object in Maya

This is the snapshot of the UV Texture Editor, if you wanted to I guess you could fiddle around making some Alpha chanels so you could see through the objects as well as have the wireframe effect on them. All depends on how much time you have.

And this is the final render, of course alot more effort is needed to make it look good, but you get the idea.

Enjoy :D

Smooth aperance
 

If you have a polygon shape that looks a bit too angular for your likeing and you haven't got the meomory or the poly count to do a smooth on it then this tip will help you out.

First select all the edges that you want to be a bit smoother, then goto 'Edit Polygons' ---> 'Normals' ---> 'Soften/Harden' Option box.

Then click 'All Soft' then click Apply.

The two pictures below show what effect this will have.

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Before
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After
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Re: Speeding up your renders
 

and how did u come up with this conclusion?

I looked the the amount of memory that was being taken up before and after doing this and it increased (as I expected).

I'm not sure how much time is saved doing this or anything else like that but it works for me and I just thought others might like to know incase it helps them in any way.

if ur not sure if this works, why are you saying it makes it go by faster.
doing this on a machine running win2k or 98 will definately be unstable from my experience. and it does NOT make rendering go faster. [unless u can post render times tests]. i would not touch the priority settings unless im a programmer and i was running a lot of programs for debugging codes etc.

maya uses a lot of ram to start with.
the way to kicik up rendering, when i render at least, is to have as little processes as possible.
i usually have no more than 17 processes on my win xp sp2 machine when i render. thats the only time that i see very minute incremental render speed.

but i dont know what machine you are using or OS, so this is not a good idea for everyone. i lost a lot of work when i was making my first reel when i attempted to put maya batch render at real-time:bandit: