When you decide to learn Maya, it can be hard to know where to begin. First of all, if you're a student or an educator, visit our Education site to get free access to Autodesk software. For everyone else, download a free trial.
What next? Well, we wanted to find out more about how our pro users first learned to use Maya, so we reached out to 230 successful Maya users to see what resources they used along the way. We hope this advice can help as a starting point to get you going in the right direction.
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Tooltips and help inside of Maya 
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Internal Maya help like tooltips are useful for giving quick information about a tool or setting without needing to look it up. 84% of successful users reported using the tooltips and help inside of Maya regularly. Discover tooltips by hovering your mouse over buttons and icons. If you don't see the tooltips, or you'd like to hide them, instructions on how to do so are at Help preferences. |
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Maya online help 
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You're already here, what a great start! Nine out of ten successful users have figured out the Maya online help pages are full of information and tutorials for every single feature of Maya. If you want to know more about a tool or function, check here! Some useful pages are All Maya hotkeys and Interface overview. |
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YouTube videos on Maya 
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If videos are more your style, YouTube is full of tutorials from talented Maya artists that are willing to help you learn. We even host the Maya Learning Channel with official beginner tutorials. There are a lot of videos to choose from, but we have a page that can help you Find learning videos on Maya. |
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Online forums for the Maya community 
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The Maya community is a great place to go for advice or to share your creations. There are lots of different sites to meet members of the community. Sites like the AREA, cgTalk, and the Maya subreddit. For more information and links to these sites see: The Maya Community. |
Formal Training with Maya
Are you wondering if you need to go to school to learn Maya? For some people, in-class training is undoubtedly the best way to go. However, 86 of the 230 Maya users we surveyed had no formal training. They were able to learn Maya by using the other resources available to them, like the ones above.
144 successful Maya users had formal training, 86 successful Maya users had no formal training.
All 230 of these successful Maya users had to start somewhere. None of them were born an expert. They had to use resources like the ones above to get where they are now. If you want to learn Maya, it might seem overwhelming at first. That's okay, just remember to take it step by step. These resources are meant to help you take those steps. Let us know what works for you by commenting on this page!