radical Edward,, thanks for the reply..

Like everything in Maya, to understand how a function works, you have to go in and do most of the operations yourself. The hands on kinesthetic way to figure things out, if you know what I mean. Just watching a video and assuming that you will be able to mimic the teacher's results never seems to work. I suppose the teacher has encountered the same problems during his/her learning curve and has forgotten that you, the student, need even the most rudimentary explanations to get through a simple procedure. By going into Maya and playing around with the program on your own seems to be the only way to master the stupid thing. To be told to go into an option box, click on option x, and then close the box, and everything will work, affords me no way to understand why I should choose one option over another. I know the writers of the program put all those other options in there for a reason. I am praying and hoping that the video instructor will explain to me why he/she selected one option over another. At least when I purchase an instructional video over the internet, I assume that the instructor will explain the why about each of those options. Since my forays into the tutorial world of Maya some eight months ago, I seldom find tutorials that really explain the inner workings of the program. I find instead that the artist/instructor shows me their great talent at manipulating the intricacies of the program but don't show me the why for behind their very impressive outcomes.