This exceptional, full-color Maya Press title -- produced by Alias, the software's creators -- offers a brand-new approach to teaching modeling and animation using the characters from the Academy Award-winning short film The ChubbChubbs. You'll find instructor-led tutorials, scene files, artist interviews, and Maya Personal Learning Edition on the enclosed DVD.
Teaches you the necessary to achieve effective character set-up and animation in Maya. This book allows you to explore character rigging based on a human character, and provides the fundamentals of properly setting up a character to avoid pitfalls as you animate.
This resource is essential for creating stunning imagery in Maya, offering hands-on experience with the Maya rendering engine and mental ray. You'll learn to set up lights and cameras, apply materials and textures, and create shading networks, whether aiming for photo-realism or expressionism. The book covers lighting, cameras, and shading networks, starting from an introductory level and progressing to advanced concepts like hardware and vector rendering. You'll master techniques such as Caustics, Global Illumination, Final Gather, and HDRI. Each chapter features theoretical discussions to deepen your understanding, along with step-by-step tutorials for immediate application. An accompanying DVD-ROM provides chapter-by-chapter overviews from Alias Certified Instructors, offering additional insights and assistance. You'll also benefit from Maya Beginner's Rendering to kickstart your learning. With this guide, you will create materials and textures, set up lights and cameras, work with shadows and raytracing, control your renders, and understand rendering for special effects and compositing. Explore hardware and vector rendering, create Caustics and Global Illumination effects, and learn about Final Gather and HDRI techniques, along with creating Maya and mental ray shaders.