Expand your skills with complete Maya mastery Mastering Autodesk Maya is the ultimate guide to the popular 3D animation software. Author Todd Palamar draws on his extensive professional animation experience to help readers take their Maya skills to the next level. Written for those who already know the basics of this enormous program, the book covers advanced topics and professional techniques for modeling, animation, texturing, and visual effects.
Fully updated to reflect Maya's latest features, the book takes a hands-on approach to instruction, providing readers with a diverse set of tutorials designed by real-world professionals to showcase 3D animation and visual techniques used in industry settings. Complete and comprehensive, the book makes an excellent desk reference for the working animator, and is an ideal resource for those seeking Maya certification. The unique combination of challenging material and practical instruction make this one-of-a-kind guide the ultimate Maya handbook. Topics include:
- Animation using inverse kinematics, keyframes, and deformers
- Hard surface and organic modeling
- Proper rigging techniques, and working with Maya Muscle
- Xgen, Paint Effects, and rendering with mental ray
- Texture mapping, compositing, nParticles, and more
- Virtual filmmaking and scene management
The most complex skills are useless if they can't be applied, so the book emphasizes the practical, day-to-day uses of each skill, and discusses which solutions best fit which scenario. For the computer animation professional seeking a more in-depth mastery of this popular animation program, Mastering Autodesk Maya is an excellent investment in the future of your career.
Get More Out of Autodesk Maya with this Official Guide
Even if you already use Maya, you'll get more out of Autodesk's popular, leading-edge 3D animation software with Mastering Autodesk Maya 2015. Author Todd Palamar draws on his extensive professional animation experience to help you take your Maya skills to the next level. Fully updated to reflect Maya's latest features, it takes a hands-on approach to instruction, providing you with a diverse set of tutorials designed by real-world professionals to showcase 3D animation and visual techniques used in industry settings. Illustrated with practical examples that bring the information to light, this guide shows you how to acquire the skills needed to use Maya in a professional environment.
Coverage includes:
- Using the Hypergraph, Outliner, Hypershade, Attribute Editor, and Connection Editor
- Animating with keyframes, expressions, and constraints
- Building a humanoid mesh using polygon and subdivision surface techniques
- Creating a facial-animation rig using blend shapes
- Lighting tools and techniques that can be used when rendering scenes with mental ray®
- Applying textures painted in other software packages
- Animating and rendering with Paint Effects
- Using XGen, Maya nHair, and nCloth
- Creating smoke, cloud, and flame effects
- Working with the Maya virtual camera
Design Cloth, Fur, and Fluids
Use Inverse Kinematics, Keyframes, and Deformers
Model Organic and Hard Surfaces
Work with Maya Muscle
Master Visual Filmmaking and Scene Management
