The Ultimate Maya Resource for Intermediate to Advanced Users

Take your Maya skills to new levels with the sophisticated coverage you?ll find in this authoritative Autodesk Maya Press reference and tutorial. From key basics through advanced techniques, our Maya experts provide the very latest professional?level instruction on Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited.

Early chapters offer a practical overview of Maya?s interface. A "Quick Start" exercise lets novices create an animation the first day and covers the basics of node structure, keyframes, and basic lighting. Advanced users will broaden their skills with pertinent coverage for nCloth, mental ray integration, volume Fur rendering, advanced texturing tools, and enhanced MEL scripting. Practical tutorials reinforce learning with hands?on practice.

If you?ve been looking for a professional?quality and complete Maya resource to turn to again and again, this is the book.

• Render and store stills through the Render View window
• Learn techniques with nCloth?s powerful cloth simulation
• Tweak and add drag?and?drop Fluid Effects for real?world effects

The CD provides tutorial files, images, and scene files that let you complete the hands?on exercises and compare your work to the pros. See the Introduction for details and complete system requirements.

John Kundert?Gibbs is Associate Professor of Animation in the Theatre & Film Studies Department at the University of Georgia and an accomplished author.

Mick Larkins is the Technical Art Lead at Hi?Rez Studios in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dariush Derakhshani is an award?winning Maya animator, author, and educator who has worked on everything from movies to the South Park TV series to commercials and music videos.

Eric Kunzendorf is a Digital Fine Arts faculty member at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

Eric Keller is a high?end animator for film, television, and scientific visualization.

Boaz Livny owns Vision Animations Inc. studio and teaches advanced Maya and mental ray courses at the NY Film Academy.

Mark E. A. de Sousa is a Computer Graphics Supervisor for Cloth and Hair at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Ed Siomacco is a Cloth/Hair Technical Director at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Take your Maya skills to new levels with the sophisticated coverage in this authoritative Autodesk Maya Press reference and tutorial. From key basics through advanced techniques, a team of Maya experts provides you with the very latest professional-level instruction on Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited through tutorials and hands-on practice. Whether a novice or an advanced user of Maya, you’ll find everything from key basics through advanced techniques.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

• Covers all of Maya’s latest features in addition to advanced Maya Unlimited topics such as cloth, fur, and fluids
• Serves as one-stop shopping for learning Maya-this resource begins with an introductory "Quick Start" overview of the workflow and tools in Maya, then moves on to more detailed, thorough instructions on the Maya interface and its modeling, texturing, animation, and visual effects tools
• All featured lessons and techniques are reinforced with practical, challenging tutorials compiled by a team of expert authors
• The CD-ROM includes tutorial files as well as the latest Maya Personal Learning Edition software

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Great Book

I bought this book to help understand nCloth in Maya and it was very helpful with explaining the different properties and how to create different effects. I can’t speak for the other sections in the book but the chapters on cloth were very helpful for me.

Bent corners

I was actualy surprised at the way my items where packaged. Mastering Maya8.5 is a pretty big book and it ended up being shrink wrapped with another item and these items weren’t boxed. In putting these two items together and packaging them the way they were the book ended up with horrible corner damage. This is the first time I have ever been dissapointed with Amazon.

Black and white

The content and exercises in this book are of high quality.

However, since all the pictures are black and white it is impossible to follow certain exercises. This makes the book completely useless. Why on earth would you spend this amount of money when you can’t even follow the exercises. Stay away from this book !

This book is excellent!

I highly encourage anyone who wants to learn 3D animation with Maya 8.5 to get this book. It comes with a CD ROM that has many helpful source files that go along with the chapter. Each chapter gives you a thorough lesson in the many powerful features that Maya 8.5 offers.

Great for intermediate 3D users, even if new to Maya..

I bought this book along with "Learning Autodesk Maya 8: Foundation" here on Amazon, and have found Mastering Maya 8.5 to be a much better help. I am relatively new to Maya, but have a 3D background (and 2d of course), applying it to mechanical engineering applications using other Autodesk products for around 10 years.

My work experience (even though it is in a different field than what Maya is used for) has given me a leg up on learning Maya (sort of, as Maya is its OWN world entirely compared to all the other programs I’ve learned, as they are just for modeling, not animation, texturing, lighting, etc.). Just so everyone knows that my review on this book is also tainted by my work history.

Using this along with Gnomon Workshop DVD’s has made me a lot more proficient at what I need to do for work in the real world a LOT faster than trying to use "Learning AutoDesk Maya 8, Foundation".

I would recommend it for the intermediate 3D modeler/artist over all the other books I’ve looked through in friend’s libraries, especially if you are actually USING 8.5 as opposed to older versions of Maya, of course :)

Very very good advice immediately in Chapter 1, regarding learning Maya in general, "The Maya interface can be a bit intimidating, and it’s not fair to expect yourself to pick it up right up and remember where everything is"... also "Try not to rush it.." Maya is a large mountain of a program, and this book has helped me along my path quite a bit.

For the new Maya user who has a 3d background in other programs, I would recommend this as a first book, even though it has the word "mastering" in the title. Also, the Gnomon workshop DVD’s on Maya are very good also if you can afford them or borrow them from a friend.

Need more time!

This book isn’t bad but you don’t really get to Master Maya with it. Mastering Maya 8.5 does provide a pretty thorough overview. I had to fly through this book in 10 weeks because the college I attend is on the quarter system. It’s a decent reference book, however, it doesn’t give specific answers but gives the reader a more general idea. I bought Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting for the next quarter and it goes into detailed explanations for every project. Maya is an extremely intensive program and time is needed to really understand it. Mastering Maya 8.5 is a great foundation book that takes you through the most basic steps everyone should know before continuing further.

Covers all the basics...

I bought this book as a refrence to cover every aspect of maya 8.5. Most of the lessons are well written, but at times can become vague. What really brings this book down are the illustrations which are black & white. This means that it can be impossible to visualize what the lessons are attempting to teach as so much in Maya is colour coded, for me this is very disapointing for what otherwise would be an excellent book.

All the things you wanted to master

This is a great intermediate-advanced book for those who have some knowledge of Maya. It teaches all the techniques you need to know to use Maya 8 to the full. Probably too advanced for a beginer.

The best keeps getting better.

This is THE book to have for the beginner and expert alike. I found its written explanation very easy-to-follow, and the illustrations are helpful as well.