The tutorials offer realistic challenges and clear explanations, laid out in fun, step-by-step lessons that help you gain confidence and learn by doing. The companion website features downloadable project files that help you see how the pros do it, and the book includes real-world examples from talented users who were beginners just like you.
The book includes a full-color insert with striking examples from talented new Maya users to inspire you. A complete update to the popular Autodesk Official Training Guide for Maya Maya is the industry-leading 3D animation and effects software used in movies, visual effects, games, cartoons, and other animation. This bestselling, official guide is a must for 3D beginners who want a thorough grounding in this dynamic and complex software.
Fully updated for the newest version of Maya, the book explains the interface and the basics of modeling, texturing, animating, dynamics, visualization, and visual effects. Fun and challenging tutorials lead you through the nuances of the software and offer plenty of chances to practice what you've learned.
Previous page. Print length. Publication date. See all details. Next page. Learn CG and 3D core concepts and production workflows Get a fast but thorough lesson on the Maya user interface Build a simple animation of the planets in the solar system, right away Explore the basics of NURBS, polygons, and subdivision surfaces modeling Create an alien hand, a steam locomotive, a toy wagon, and more Rig for animation and get the most out of Maya's powerful Graph Editor tool Master HDRI lighting, mental ray rendering, dynamics, visualization, and effects Use reference pictures to model objects more accurately Learn how to apply and adjust textures and materials.
Dariush Derakhshani is an award-winning visual effects supervisor, author, and educator. Start reading Introducing Autodesk Maya on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? About the author Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. Rendered Images. Click here to order. If you find any problems in downloading the files or the contents, please contact us at techsupport cadcim. Thank you. The first page of every chapter summarizes the topics that are covered in it.
Consists of hundreds of illustrations and a comprehensive coverage of Autodesk Maya concepts and commands Real-world 3D models and examples focusing on industry experience. Step-by-step instructions that guide the user through the learning process.
Additional information is provided throughout the book in the form of tips and notes. Self-Evaluation test, Review Questions, and Exercises are given at the end of each chapter so that the users can assess their knowledge. Dialog boxes, accessible as drop down windows, add visible interfaces to the UI in which information about models, animation, rigging, lighting, shading or rendering is available.
Thus, we must find ways of exposing the deep structure to the user in ways that are compatible, intuitive and efficient Fitzmaurice and Buxton, On such dialog boxes the schema reveal relationships between the packets of data that constitute a scene, a contrast to the viewport that shows relationships between co-ordinates along lines of geometry, in other words shapes.
This is shown in figure 4a where data projected as a simple sphere in the viewport is schematically depicted in the hypergraph, which is shown as a separate window on the UI. Figure 4 b depicts in more detail a swivel base model as a hierarchy of joints. These schemas bring the deep structure closer to the surfaces. Figures 4 a and b HERE The sense of a shift towards agency shared between the user and system via these dialog boxes is evident in the following remark made by PH about the script editor.
The language of Maya lies in the architecture: what is actually running everything. The sharing of agency between user and system is increasingly evident when delving more deeply into what the dialog boxes reveal about the protocols of the software.
Though users may ultimately input parameters and so never fully relinquish control, algorithms too hold agency in that they determine what operations do and do not occur. The space that emerges is based around arrangements of packets of data, reconfigured and connected through computation. The organization of these packets of data is a feature of the program language. Digital space so conceived does not rely on locatedness within a given space and absolute dimensionality, but is instead something that comes into being during the execution of a program as it connects smaller interacting elements.
Described in this way, digital space at first seems to be both deferred and diffuse, an abstract entity. So as to give a sense of the schematic nature of these dialog boxes, the description is by necessity somewhat technical. So is that very technical? Yes it is. Figure 5 shows a subset set of nodes and their relations from the creature on the right hand side of the figure.
The depicted nodes show animation curves linked to joints, and includes data on shaders associated with those joints the textures of the creature.
Types of nodes include the creation node, the transform node and the shape node, as well as information about lighting and camera positions. In addition, nodes have attributes, values that control how a node works, which are visible in the attribute editor. In the transform node, which controls movement, rotation and scale, the attributes define the amount of transform that occurs.
For example, a nurbsCurve node has an attribute that contains a NURBS curve, essentially a numeric description of the shape of the curve. This attribute can be connected to the input of a revolve node. The revolve node also has input attributes describing the sweep angle and the axis that it would revolve around.
Figure 5 HERE Taken at a highly abstract level, working with Maya involves using manipulators in the viewport to make direct changes to nodes and attributes. But rather than a scene being defined as objects in time and space, it can be depicted as a dependency graph DG , which is essentially a chain of nodes Autodesk, For instance, the attribute editor and the hypergraph respectively show numeric values and schematize the connections between nodes, the input and output data of each node.
In such dialog boxes, data is depicted on the basis of conceptual modelling. The data can never be seen to transform in the moment of computation, so it can only be shown in diagrammatic versions of the computational relationships.
It reminds me of, mostly of electronics, logic gates and things. All the different tasks that you want to achieve and, they all have their own utility, they all have their own toolbox that you can go into yourself. Pallettes and things. Aside from the script editor, in which the executed code scrolls by, nodes contain the strongest tracings of the deep structures of the software, and are also the place where the automated processes of software come closest to being tangible.
Such messaging is hidden by encapsulation so the sender has to trust the elements of the program to co-ordinate and work together. Through this kind of thinking, the idea that software is invisible might easily come back.
Working between the virtually projected objects in the viewport and the schematic diagrams of dialog boxes, user agency is bundled and dispersed through different routes generated by the connections between algorithms, with agency accumulating in ways that are shared with both user and software.
When talking about automation it remains true that software executes somewhere behind the scenes, but the engagements by users of animation software with the operational logics of automated processes is revealed via the visual organizations of the UI.
This takes its users closer to the deeper structures of the software. Automated processes are part of the terrain of computer-generated animation, and so too is the skill necessary to creatively work with those automated processes, whether this engagement is with the surface of the software, or at a deeper level. It is the art side and the technical side joining up. Configurations In: Huhtamo E and Parikka J eds.
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, Autodesk The Art of Maya.
Indianapolis, IN: Sybex. Derakhshani D Introducing Autodesk Maya Computer Graphics 32 4 : New York: Autonomedia. Galloway A The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal 7 2 : In: Bergin T and Gibson G eds. History of Programming Languages volume 2.