Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110481 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

From the Back Cover
The Modeling & Animation Handbook.

Develop out of this world modeling and animation skills with Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 / 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 an then make them move with a wide range of animation techniques directly from the makers of Autodesk® software. You′ll learn to make sound decision from the beginning, to save yourself unnecessary challenges further down the pipeline.

With this book, you will:

• Model with polygons, NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces
• Understand skeletons and joint orientation
• Work with inverse kinematics
• Setup a leg, arm and spine
• Work with blendShapes
• Skin your characters
• Create constraints
• Create a walk cycle
• Animate a complete scene including props, constraints and characters

Bonus features included on DVD

• Free models from Turbo Squid
• Autodesk Maya reference guides
• support files

What you need to use this book

• Autodesk® Maya® Complete 2008 or Maya® Personal Learning Edition software
• DVD–ROM drive

Customer Reviews

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.