So one of the first things to talk about is what is Maya. Maya is a 3D animation package that can be used for everything from feature films, video game content creation, visual effects, product design, architectural pre-visualization, and broadcast graphics like flying logos, and a whole host of other things. It's kind of up to your imagination. If you need to create beautiful 3D graphics very often you're going to find yourself looking for a package that's fully featured like Maya. And by fully featured, I mean it includes tools for modeling, which is the creation of objects, for example, this little couch here. This was created with polygon modeling tools, and so Maya, we'll be going over some of the interface later, but if you look up here where I'm clicking, we have a list of different modules or areas of Maya, and one of them is the polygon modeling. There's also tools in Maya for creating other types of services, such as nurbs and subdivision surfaces, and Maya's also used for animation, so there are tools for creating the setups for characters or props, objects, bouncing balls, you name it. And giving the animator tools to animate those objects, you know, tools for adjusting the look of something, and this includes painting textures onto your objects and setting the values of materials that you see in the scenes. For example, if I take a look at this sofa here, it has a material on it right now that's giving it this brownish orange color, and I can go in and do things such as turn this guy into a blue couch, kind of a purplish blue couch there. There are also tools in Maya for adjusting the lighting. In this scene, there's, you can see some lighting already created here, and I can go and adjust the way that lighting looks just like you'd adjust lights in a live action set or in stage lighting. So the paradigm is pretty similar to setting lights in the real world. And there are also tools for more advanced things such as particular effects, which can be used for smoke, sparks, those kinds of things; dynamics, which is a simulation of different kinds of physics, things bouncing around off of each other, colliding, reacting to gravity, wind, and other external forces. And there are also modules inside of Maya for creating hair and fur. If you have hairy and furry creatures in your scenes, you're probably going to take a look at those more advanced topics.