About the Maya Help

The Maya Help (what you're looking at) provides searchable documentation on all the features in Maya, from beginner to advanced techniques. It also contains technical documentation with information about scripting, and developer help with detailed information about the Maya API.

• If you arrived here from within Maya, by pressing F1, selecting Help > Maya Help, or clicking on the Application Home hub, then all you need to do is use the table of contents to the left or the search bar in the top-right to find what you're looking for.

  Note: If articles appear out of date or videos appear missing, you may be using the Offline Help. Offline Help is useful if you don't have a regular connection to the internet, but the Online version provides more up-to-date content, a better search experience, YouTube and AREA videos, and forum posts. If you think that you're getting the Offline Help, check with your system administrator to see if its possible to switch and make sure that the Help Location in the Help Preferences is set to Autodesk Web Site.
• If you arrived here from the internet, such as via a search engine like Google, you may be looking at the Autodesk Knowledge Network (AKN) version of this page. Click the link above (just below the Autodesk logo) to reach the full Maya User Guide, then use the table of contents and search bar to find what you're looking for. You can do this on any AKN version of a help page.

  Note: It's also a good idea to make sure that the version of Maya in the help article matches the version of Maya you're currently using. The article version is visible in the URL, or in AKN by clicking on the Products and versions covered button.

Troubleshooting specific help tasks

To...	Do this
Open and search the online help.	Select Help > Maya Help, or press F1, then enter a keyword in the Search bar.
Find a tool or menu item in the interface.	Select Help > Find Menu. The name of the menu item and the menu and menu set it is in is returned. Interface overview is an image of the Maya interface with the names and a basic description of all the main interface elements. It gives you links to where things are described so you can find more information.
Find help for a specific window or tool.	Look for a Help menu within the tool's settings (as opposed to the main Help menu).
Get a description of/instructions for the action under the cursor.	Look in the Help line (bottom left), or turn on Display ToolClips in the Help preferences.
Find hotkeys.	All Maya Hotkeys lists every single keyboard shortcut you can press in Maya.
Find technical documentation.	You can access this in the Scripting topic, including MEL, and Python, and Dash.
Download an offline version of the Maya Help.	Visit www.autodesk.com/maya-helpdownload-enu to download the Maya help. Unzip it to a local directory on your system or to a shared location on an internal network (which uses http or https protocol). In Maya, open the Help preferences window by selecting Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences. Under Categories, click Help. In the Help Location section, select Custom, and then click the icon to browse to the location of your local copy of the Maya Help. Note: If pointing to a shared network location, make sure to use the actual path and not an alias. Select the index.html file. Click Save and exit the Preferences window. Pressing F1 will now open the offline version of the Maya help.
See the version of Help that matches your version of Maya.	Sometimes when using a search engine to look up the Maya Help, the results may not reflect your version of the software. You can check / change the version number in the help page's URL at the top of your web browser.
Contact customer support.	Find the Contact Us page online at https://www.autodesk.com/company/contact-us.