Product Description

Create positively dazzling effects with the unique insights and practical advice in this innovative guide from a working professional Maya artist. Need to create plasmatic energy by lunch? Animate a field of sprouting daisies before tomorrow’s meeting? Fashion a force field by Friday? With Maya’s flexible toolset and the unique tutorials in this book, you’ll learn how to solve real–world problems, improvise, and finish your professional assignments on time and with flair.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #247519 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

From the Back Cover
Create Dazzling Maya Visual Effects Out of Thin Air

If you need to create stunning effects on a tight deadline for finicky clients and demanding art directors, this book is for you. Go from Post–it Notes to positively dazzling with the unique insights and practical advice in this innovative guide from a working professional Maya artist. Need to create plasmatic energy by lunch? Animate a field of sprouting daisies before tomorrow’s meeting? Fashion a force field by Friday? With Maya’s flexible toolset and the unique tutorials in this book, you’ll learn how to solve real–world problems, improvise, and finish your professional assignments on time and with flair.

• Animate a zombie hand transformation, UFO glow, and streaking energy with textures
• Make a tentacle shake and slither using expressions and joints
• Use Paint Effects to create twitching nerves and bacterial hair
• Split crystals with Rigid Body Dynamics
• Animate a collapsing rope bridge using Maya Hair
• Master particle instancing and collision effects
• Get a handle on scripting with MEL

About the Author
Eric Keller has been using Autodesk′s Maya to create professional animations since version 1 was released and has been an enthusiast ever since. He is currently a high–end animator for film, television, and scientific visualization. His clients include Disney, ESPN, Hewlett–Packard, CBS, and ABC. Prior to that, he created animations for some of the world′s top researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was a contributing author to Mastering Maya 7 and Mastering Maya 8.5 (Sybex).

Customer Reviews

Very readable and technically excellent
I've only been interested in Maya from a purely hobbyist point of view - it's good fun, if sometimes overwhelming.

Eric Keller is obviously very familiar with the software, and from his writing style in the book I can only assume he's an excellent teacher. He manages to write about a deeply technical subject in a way that makes reading fun and interesting.

The book is broken up with plenty of screenshots, illustrations and examples. I particularly liked the way that each scenario is treated as a real life situation "Your art director has just handed you a napkin with vague instructions of some 3d effects involving a mad scientist and a wriggling 3d tentacle scribbled on it. He wants a playblast movie by lunchtime..." is a typical scenario from the book and you are taken through the scenario step by step.

One of Maya's strengths is its flexibility in allowing you many ways to accomplish any one task. Taking this further, Eric delights in using seeming disparate parts of the program to do weird and wonderful things with other parts of the program, and producing some amazing effects as a end result.

Fantastically readable and probably the best Maya book I've bought, having bought a further 6 'learning...' maya books. If Mr Keller writes anything else, I'm buying it!