UntitledMaya, one of the key professional applications for modeling, animating, and rendering 3-D images, is now available for both Windows and Macintosh users. Maya is quickly spreading throughout the high-end film and animation industry as digital content creators gravitate to Maya for its powerful and professional tool set. From feature films to interactive video games, Maya is the tool of choice for anyone creating digital content. Exploring Maya 4: 30 Studies shows how to use specific techniques to achieve everyday animation effects and goals. Each chapter starts with a "how can I do this?" question, and illustrates how to create a specific effect, such as simulating the wings of a flying bird, or the movement of grass, cloth, or trees. This book explores Maya with thirty different studies, approaching the software from a playful and practical perspective where everyday life and thoughts are sources of inspiration.

AliasWavefront’s Maya is one of the most powerful, high-end 3D animation and visual effects applications available today. Animators around the world use Maya to create quality digital content for film, video, broadcast, and game development.

Exploring Maya 4: 30 Studies in 3D provides a practical, project-based approach to Maya 4, using hands-on, working tutorials for the professional 3D artist. Author Maximilian Schonherr highlights ways to achieve specific projects and tasks in Maya. Each chapter starts with a Rhow can I do this?S question, such as RHow do I animate a bicyclist?S or RHow do I model a nose with a wart and freckles?S or "What’s the best way to simulate the movement of grass in a field?" This book dives into Maya thirty times from very different angles, approaching the software from a playful and practical perspective, where everyday life and thoughts are sources of inspiration.

Production Company

This book was very good by showing all ways to model each item. It helped solidify what was the best way to create certain objects. I would recommend this for a beginner to intermediate modeler that needs to learn quick and simple ways to model.

Exploring Maya 4: 30 Studies in 3D by Maximilian Schoenherr

Excellent projects even though its now 3 versions old. An absolute must for beginners and intermediate users alike.

An excellent resource for the user of Maya PLE

For those experimenting with Maya, this is a very helpful book to have. It is not entirely self contained and you should make use of Maya’s documentation that works with the software.

Excellent Book!

After seeing some of the negative reviews posted, I felt compelled to add my own experience with the book. This is easily one of the best 3d Books of any kind I’ve ever purchased. Those unhappy with the book are missing the whole point. The author is not trying to present tutorials that are an end in themselves. Those are a dime a dozen on the web. Instead he focuses on theory and the hows and why’s so one can take that knowlege and create on their own. I enjoyed this approach and I will be looking foward to the author’s next work.

Neat Little Book

This is a neat little book (182 page). It’s a short little tutorial book. It’s not deep in-depth, but it has some useful tricks in it. For example, I couldn’t figure out the best way to make my orange roll off the counter in my Ant cartoon. I used what I learned in the ball rolling tutorial to figure it out.
The printing quality, graphical layout, and organization in this book is the best I’ve ever seen.

Very Nice

This book is a Maya equivelent of those little books of daily wisdom. Each chapter is less than 5 pages, but is a nice refresher for those of us who are pigeoned into doing only one thing in the industry. If I were starting out this is the book I would get, and as an industry pro I like the simplicity of the tutorials because they opened a dialogue between my skills and practices.