Template:Maya diplay options more

In the shading menu in your viewport there are also other ways of displaying the objects in that viewport, for instance, the wire frame on shaded can be useful:

With the X-ray shading mode objects will be shown transparent.

The interactive shading can be very useful too, especially when you are handling a very large and slow model. This shading mode shows the objects in shaded (or wireframe on shaded)mode when not navigating, but shows the objects in wireframe mode when using the navigating tools. The backface culling can also be convenient. When using it, Maya only shows the faces that have the normals facing in the direction of the camera you're looking through. In this way it's easy to detect which faces might have the normals in the wrong direction.

Also very useful options can be found in the show menu in your viewport:

It is possible to show only the object you have selected, to do this, select the objects you want to be shown, then go to Show » Isolate Select » View Selected. To show all objects again go to Isolate Select again to check it off.

You can also let Maya only show objects of certain types, for instance, when you are modeling you don't need to show all the camera's and lights, so in the show menu in the viewport you can check the things you need and turn off the things you don't need to see.