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.

Publisher: Sybex; 1 edition (August 4, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1118862511
ISBN-13: 978-1118862513

Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover

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
About the Author

Todd Palamar began his career creating traditional special effects for low-budget horror movies and quickly gravitated to computer animation. After working on numerous straight-to-video movies, he entered the video game industry. Todd has extensive freelance experience, including dozens of military and game-style simulations, corporate commercials, and theme park rides. In addition, he has written several Maya books, including Maya Studio Projects: Photorealistic Characters and several editions of Mastering Autodesk Maya.