Develop out of this world modeling and animation skills with Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 I The Modeling & Animation Handbook. Follow clear, step-by-step tutorials to understand the modeling and animation stages of production using artwork from the LAIKA short film Moongirl. Learn to build models with a variety of surface types and then make them move with a wide range of animation techniques directly from the makers of Autodesk Maya. You’ll learn to make sound decisions from the beginning, to save yourself unnecessary challenges further down the pipeline. You’ll learn how to model with polygons, NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces; understand skeletons and joint orientation; work with inverse kinematics, skin your characters; animate a complete scene including props, constraints, and characters; and much more. The bonus DVD includes free models from Turbo Squid, Autodesk Maya reference guides, and scene files to help you breathe life into your creations.

* Maya is the industry-leading 3D animation and effects software widely used in movies, video games, cartoons, short films, commercials, and more
* Using the award-winning animated short Open Season for the book’s all-new hands-on tutorials, this exceptional full-color book offers readers clear, step-by-step projects to help them understand the complexities of modeling and animation in Maya
* Teaches readers how to build models with a variety of surface types and create realistic movement with a wide range of animation techniques
* Covers essential Maya topics such as polygon modeling, texturing, using layers to organize work, creating skeleton chains, editing joint orientation, understanding forward and inverse kinematics, using pole vector constraints for realistic motion in arms and legs, and more

• Maya is the industry-leading 3D animation and effects software widely used in movies, video games, cartoons, short films, commercials, and more
• Using the award-winning animated short Open Season for the book’s all-new hands-on tutorials, this exceptional full-color book offers readers clear, step-by-step projects to help them understand the complexities of modeling and animation in Maya
• Teaches readers how to build models with a variety of surface types and create realistic movement with a wide range of animation techniques
• Covers essential Maya topics such as polygon modeling, texturing, using layers to organize work, creating skeleton chains, editing joint orientation, understanding forward and inverse kinematics, using pole vector constraints for realistic motion in arms and legs, and more

• Maya is the industry-leading 3D animation and effects software widely used in movies, video games, cartoons, short films, commercials, and more
• Using the award-winning animated short Open Season for the book’s all-new hands-on tutorials, this exceptional full-color book offers readers clear, step-by-step projects to help them understand the complexities of modeling and animation in Maya
• Teaches readers how to build models with a variety of surface types and create realistic movement with a wide range of animation techniques
• Covers essential Maya topics such as polygon modeling, texturing, using layers to organize work, creating skeleton chains, editing joint orientation, understanding forward and inverse kinematics, using pole vector constraints for realistic motion in arms and legs, and more

Great Resource

This is a really cool learning guide. It is geared a little more towards people who have a basic understanding of the Maya universe. If you have never used maya at all, it may be a little confusing. I suggest playing with the interface and going through the "Getting Started" lessons included with the Maya software before getting into this book.. The dvd contains support files for the lessons in the book. It would have been nice if it had some video reference. The pictures in the book aren’t the best guides, so unless you understand the text, you may find yourself using more creative freedom to complete the models than actual tutoring. Still, it is a great reference and gives you all you need to create some complete models to practice building and animating. Hope this helps.

For those with some experience

As per the title the book assumes some basic modeling principles and recommends the more fundamentals book if you don’t albeit with a typo.

I’ve played in Maya and completed a fair few free tutorials online. I made some very basic characters and rigged them so I had no trouble getting into this book’s first chapter.
It starts off with you general definitions but quickly gets into modeling a polygonal character. It’s laid out very well with plenty of descriptions and full colour screens with annotations and arrows.

To give an idea of what sort of speed you’ll be going at by the 106th page you’ll have made a clean polygonal character and textured it using the UVW map tools inside Maya PLE. Ready for rigging, skinning and the holy grail- animation, in later chapters.

The book goes at a decent pace, a couple of pages can take you what seems like an endless amount of time but it’s always very thorough if you need to skip back. I do the tutorials whilst listening to music so that’s probably a fault of myself.

A couple of times I’ve been left in the dark. However this book comes with a DVD with models finished at each of the steps so you can actually check how yours compares to the one in the book. The instance was whether I should be using a triangle or a ngon around the arms which wasn’t in one of the screenshots in the book so that’s an indispensable tool.

The rest of the book’s almost 600 pages take you on to make a nurbs character, another using the subdivision process, through the skeletal workflow for each then blend shapes, skinning, deformers and finally some animation.

I’d recommend it for someone with a bit of experience with the Maya PLE available free online. I really like the art that runs through the projects and even at the fairly high price of £26, I’m learning a lot of cool techniques which can be applied to more than just the examples in this book. I’ve never bought a 3D book before so it has to be 4/5 stars. I’m pleasantly surprised by it and you can tell that they’ve been iterating the format of these books for a while to get them so efficient at explaining 3D concepts.

Having tried both video tutorials online- I’ve found you have to work a little harder to get through it but it’s vastly more rewarding. Hope that helps, I was a little skeptical about dropping the money on a book with almost no reviews online so I took the plunge for the rest of you.

Easy to use Handbook!

This is the ideal guide for those who want to perfectionate his or her modelling skills. Extremelly usefull step by step tutorials. Highly recommened. Another score for Autodesk!

great!!!

it is a great reference book!! I’m a student at animation major.. this is helping me all the time.. Also you can use this book for learning the software by yourself.. it is explaning and then give you assignments so you can understand the lesson well..

good luck!!