The procedures in this section presume a basic familiarity with the Maya environment. Complete instructions on the use of Maya are beyond the scope of this site. Information on broader topics, like modeling, lighting, animation and rendering, can be found at the sites provided in the external links section of this site
A Maya model consists of a set of points in a tree axis coordinate system. The model also describes how these points are connected to each other. The Maya modeling environment displays these points and their connections in the form of a wire frame model.	A wireframe model
Model with default shader	While this view may be useful when building a model, it is transparent, and therefore somewhat difficult to interpret. To aid in creating a scene, Maya also provides the ability to show models with closed surfaces on the wire frame. Maya associates a flat gray shader to these surfaces by default.
To create and alter shading groups, click on Window>>Rendering Editors>>Hypershade. This will open the Hypershade editor. Before creating any new shading groups the only one available is the flat gray default shader. It is best to leave this shader as is and create a new one.	The Hypershade window