2 | CHAPTER 1 WORKING IN AUTODESK MAYA
Any given workfl ow in Maya is much like a route on a city map. There are usually many
ways to get to your destination, and some of them make more sense than others depending on
where you’re going. In Maya, the best workfl ow depends on what you’re trying to achieve, and
there is typically more than one possible ideal workfl ow.
There are many types of nodes in Maya that serve any number of different functions. All
the nodes in Maya are considered DG nodes. Let’s say you have a simple cube and you subdivide
it once, thus quadrupling the number of faces that make up the cube. The information
concerning how the cube has been subdivided is contained within a DG node that is connected
to the cube node.
A special type of DG node is the directed acyclic graph (DAG) node. These nodes are made of
two specifi c types of connected nodes: transform and shape. The arrangement of DAG nodes
consists of a hierarchy in which the shape node is a child of the transform node. Most of the
objects you work with in the Maya viewport, such as surface geometry (cubes, spheres, planes,
and so on), are DAG nodes.
To understand the difference between the transform and shape node types, think of a transform
node as describing where an object is located and a shape node as describing what an
object is.
The simple polygon cube in Figure 1.1 consists of six fl at squares attached at the edges to
form a box. Each side of the cube is subdivided twice, creating four polygons per side. That
basically describes what the object is, and the description of the object would be contained in
the shape node. This simple polygon cube may be 4.174018 centimeters above the grid, rotated
35 degrees on the x-axis, and scaled four times its original size based on the cube’s local x- and
y-axes and six times its original size in the cube’s local z-axis. That description would be in the
transform node.