Maya Featuring Creature Creations [With Cdrm]

Maya Feature Creature Creations consists of two parts. The first part deals with the creation of a clay model, the second part with the digital translation of the clay model and the possibilities of rigging and skinning the digital creature.The weak spot of the book is bit between the two parts, that where the clay model is scanned and digitally translated. Not many readers will have the hardware to properly scan a clay model. This makes the first part of the book somewhat useless. Interesting for someone who wants to know the process of creature creation in films but not usable for personal training.The strength of the book therefore lies, in my opinion, in the latter halve of the book. Todd Palamar there dives deeply into several modelling and rigging methods. Other than the standard Maya book he views more savvy ways of production and the Maya user with experience can learn a lot from it. In the last part of the book Todd looks at skinning methods using softbodies with underlying muscles and tendons. Extremely interesting, but since even the larger studios are battling with the difficulties of dynamics driven skin, it is not surprising that the methods explained do not lead to smooth results. The troubleshooting section in the end trying to solve problems in this field could have been a chapter in itself since many problems come with dynamic skinning. It's typical that Todd is not able to show a properly muscle skinned animation of his creature at the end of the book, but is able to show some pics of where the skin went horribly wrong.So why 4 stars? Because the book is an excellent training tool, a well written manual deep into Maya and only one of the few books able to touch upon the area's of dynamics driven skin or mel driven rigs. Also the wide scale of methods explained is great for those who are not looking for quick solutions and crappy rigs. Combine it with the Jason Schleifer dvd lectures and `Maya Character Creation: Modeling and Animation Controls' from Chris Maraffi for the full picture and learn to create your own methods for advanced rigs and skinning methods.

I found this book very useful on learning character setup. It gives a more advance concept through different difficulty of examples depending on how comfortable are you with the chapters. The whole book contain a lot of very useful information and with quite a few industry experience reminder. While you are going through the book with your software, It kind of feels like an very experience industry expert sits in your book telling you all sorts of different valuable knowledge in making 3D creatures & related. As there are a lot of Maya tutorial that's on the market which a lot of them is like reading the software's help file which is totally nonsense. This book is one of the nicer one that I will always recommend this book to anyone that like creature set up & relate.

this is a well written book on maya for advanced readers/users. in-depth chapters about modeling and texturing a fictional animal. how do we texture polygons, subDs and nurbs? alias|wavefront's docs answer no questions here. todd does.another fine chapter: animating the character's skin by the motion of bones and muscles. rigid and soft body dynamics and a few driven keys.sadly, the publisher printed this book in black & white which makes some screenshots unusable.a large portion of the book deals with clay modeling. why not?