Learning Autodesk Maya 8 Foundation [With DVD]

I'm taking my first Maya class after studying motion graphics for a while, and this book has been a tremendous help. It's very well written and the full color pages really help illustrate the variety of grids, CVs, selections and menu options, that would be very hard to read in a black and white book. Maya can be a very intimidating program but this book really gets you very comfortable quickly with a general overview of tools and techniques, before getting in to the more thorough walkthroughs of modeling, skinning, rigging, and more. My only criticism of the book is that occasionally when there are walkthroughs on creating the example models, despite the explanations being very thorough, there is occasionally a step skipped, which can be confusing but at those stages I've been able to figure it out. I can imagine how difficult it is to write a step by step tutorial for modeling a bear from a box so I'll forgive them here!

This text is required for my Maya class. Before purchasing this book I had been of the perspective that "tutorial" books were relatively useless because their focus on a particular project necessarily meant that they were not ideal as reference tools. While I still believe this to be true, to a certain extent, I have also learned far more from this book than all of my others combined. I have seen several other reviews for this book that point out "errors" in the instructions. While at times I have run across various sections that appear, at first, to have incorrect directions (as have many of my fellow students), in EVERY SINGLE CASE it was due to not reading the material carefully enough. I have successfully completed both sections listed by the other reviewers (and, indeed, about half the book) without any real difficulty. The material itself is very well done. Although the book moves somewhat quickly from introductory stuff (background, interface, etc) to some relatively complex modeling, rigging and animation it nevertheless manages to stay quite easy to read, understand and follow. Before reading this book both 'skinning' and 'rigging' were strange words that described even stranger processes which were as mystifying to me as they were intimidating. Now I am eager and ready to jump off and create my own characters. With this book I am confidant that I can take the process from beginning to end; from modeling to skinning, rigging, texturing, animation and rendering.

This book is all you need for getting started in Maya. With this book you don't even need any other instruction. The only downside is that some of the instructions are vague(ie. "dothese three things and then go to the next step") but it does force you to figure things out for yourself.

This book is very quick with tutorials and walks you through step by step. You go from learning interface then basic tools, then go right into modeling and the works. This is a real good book to get you better used to Maya and its amazing tools.

This is a fairly good book. Among all the books I checked this is the only one that gives a decent introduction to Maya 8.(Hence the five stars!) This is a proper tutorial. You need to sit in front of the computer and work along as you read. And as long as you follow the instructions real carefully and don't skip anything, you will be fine. I was able to impress all my friends with the very first exercise! (A garage with a door-opening animation) I would like to point out a very serious error in one of the other reviews. The one titled 'Many wrong directions'. When I first read that review I almost decided not to buy this book! But finally I did buy it. And when I reached page 51 - the one that 'Truth Teller Tiger' was complaining about - I realized he was simply wrong. When the books directions says '...In the Polygons menu set..' It means just that - Select 'Polygons' Menu set out of the list of 'Animations, Polygons,Surfaces' etc. It doesn't say you should look for 'Display -> Polygons -> Normals'(That "Display -> Polygons ->" option was used in the previous step - and that was clearly marked as a different step). I am surprised this reviewer has 'spent hours and hours' trying to figure this out- which took me not even 30 seconds - and I am completely new to Maya! So I wouldn't blame the books directions as yet. I feel 'Truth Teller Tiger's review is very misleading for this reason. I just thought other readers considering this book may find this information useful. I wanted to warn people about this misleading review. <br /> <br />