Learning Maya5 [Paperback]

While the book is not without its problems, I think I would disagree with some of the harsh criticisms of other reviewers. This book really does deliver on its title, it gives you the proper "Foundations" to start doing more serious work in Maya. To anyone who's read it thoroughly, it does give you a very good insight into Maya theory, it discusses the "node system" and dependency graphs, which allow you to create procedural animations very easily, and are the basis for how everything is done in Maya.

I think the real point of this book is to get the user comfortable with all of the features capabilities (and quirks) of the program. If you've ever tried to learn Maya just by clicking on the menus and trying to figure it out intuitively, you'll soon realize that it's not effective at all. Maya is such a complex piece of software that all user intuition goes out the window. This book walks you through step by step in modeling, animation, and rendering examples. It's often easy to want to skip parts that look obvious, but 90% of the time you end up having to go back to it later. The best way to read this book is to go through it, actually following every step, and reading every instruction or note. If you do, you will know the basics of Maya in and out. I think that it's a good philosophy for starting to learn such a complex piece of software, because you'll have people who learn just enough to get by, and try to move on to more advanced topics and either hit a wall because they encounter a situation they don't know how to deal with, or end up with sloppy and inefficient results.

There are some things about the book that I dislike. The detail of this book is very uniform. Pretty much all topics are covered in the same depth. Some of the trickier elements I found in the early lessons were doing NURBS surface attachments, which were covered somewhat cursorily in the book, and the Joints and Skinning sections were covered in thorough but uneccessary detail. The trick is that the way Maya is designed, it makes some things that seem simple (like joining two surfaces) very very hard and error prone, while some things while even complicated conceptually, like adding bones to a mesh and making it move around, are really pretty straightforward and intuitive. The book goes through everything at pretty much the same level of detail, and doesn't take the nature of Maya's design into account . Of course everyone is going to run into their own specific problems, but I think they should have made more of an attempt at finding the "tough spots", or common mistakes and focusing on them in more detail, and explaining exactly what to do to remedy them and why.

Also, it is not a book on graphics/animation/modeling *theory*, it is a book on Maya, and Maya alone. You may get some basics of general computer graphics concepts, but only because they coincide with learning Maya ;)

If anyone has seen the book I am looking for, please send me an e-mail at trz66@hotmail.com. Once again I'm looking for a book with a solid chapter of at least 50 pages on each of the following topics at a high-level: Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rigging, Animating. Then a follow-up chapter with in-depth explanation of the tools in Maya used for each topic including a series of tutorials (at least one basic, one intermediate, and one advanced). Is this book out there?