Welcome to Maya 8.5 Fundamentals VTC. My name's John Park, and I'm a character technical director at Walt Disney Animation studios and also teach Maya to animators and designers in Los Angeles. In this training video, I'm going to be teaching you the fundamentals of Maya as well as taking you through some of the practical examples of my work flow. So the main areas of Maya that we're going to be discussing are the workspace; how to get around the various buttons and menus, as well as customizing things like shelves and hot keys to make your life a little easier and faster inside of Maya. I'll also being taking a look at modeling workflow, create objects, animation and character set up, shading and lighting, as well as final rendering of your scenes and animations. I'm going to be working on the Windows XP system, but you'll find that the interface is almost identical for Macintosh and Linux users. If there are areas where keys differ, I will probably mention those at the beginning but then assume that you've got a handle on those as we move forward through the series. By the end of this, you should be comfortable creating models, animating them, setting lights up, and setting the materials, and finally, rendering your scenes. So thanks a lot, and I hope you enjoy this series.