Maya Character Creation: Modeling and Animation Controls

This book is great to have because it tells you much about rigging and building models in CGI programs, mostly Maya. This book is a must have for any CGI animator.

This is a must have book for anyone interested at all in rigging in Maya. Its very useful for the person who knows how to rig but wants to take their rigging skills to the next level. Detailed enough to pull the info you need and discard what you don't, plus there's plenty of pictures. I gave this a fifth star because it includes some great scripting to create usable shelf controls. Which is very hard to come by in an easy to follow book.

Outside of the patch modeling and other preparation to animation, the rigging in this book is AWESOME!! I love this book and use it as a resource often. The advanced MEL scripting you will learn will allow you to create a graphical user interface for selection of the character and sliders for the controls as well as advanced facial animation setup and great skeletal hierarchy with nice driven and cluster based motion. The author has emailed me back with the question i asked him quickly and efficiently, very nice guy. I don't care who you are and what you do but if you use Maya definitely buy this book.

I'm beyond the intermediate rigging level and I wanted to do some detailed facial and body expressions. I used to wonder how the Hulk was rigged--not anymore. I used to wonder how to create those cool control panels for animating without scrolling through a character node for hours. Although it's a different approach than Bay Raitt used with Gollum in LOTR, it's pretty damn useful. I learned everything in the Gnomon Video tapes and still ran into a brick wall when it came to advanced animation controls for characters. I used to wonder how to get the best subtle animations for a face. I used to wonder how to rig a jiggle deformer element with springs and softbodies. This book has it all. I plan on memorizing it. You have to know this stuff now to get a job being a creature developer. There's no way around it. Anatomical deformation and servicing the animators on a team with MEL-scripting knowledge. This book will catapult you into a different realm of rigging. Serious Maya character set-up artists need it. I even learned how to use some of the new Maya 5 NURBS tools and slider tools that no one ever seems to mention.another great book for this is "Emotions Revealed" by Paul Ekman to study facial expressions and how to create them... ....