What you'll learn

In this series of lessons, we'll learn how to use Maya's Assets system to organize a set of nodes into a single, easy-to-use location. Using Maya Assets, we can gather all of the attributes we need to edit into a single location for easier editing and animation. We'll begin this project by taking a look at how the Asset system works inside of Maya. We will then dive right in by adding our prebuilt rocket into a container to begin our asset and then learn the various methods of adding functionality to that asset. We will learn how to control the basic transforms of the rocket with the asset, view, and edit the shaders connected using the Asset Editor and create a custom icon displayed in the Outliner. Finally, we go over how to lock and black box our Asset so we only see the values we need to edit. This series of lessons will guide us through taking a model or object we already have, and creating an Asset around it to make it easier to control and animate. By using the Asset system in your own workflow, you can keep all of your objects organized and quickly editable. Software required: Maya 2009 and up.