Maya 2 Character Animation - Softcover

Vogel, Nathan; Sheridan, Sherri; Coleman, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735708665 ISBN 13: 9780735708662

Publisher: New Riders Pub, 1999

Synopsis

Maya is the most powerful artistic tool ever created to help bring to life anything you can imagine. One of the most eagerly anticipated and powerful pieces of software for high-end 3D animation. Maya offers an exceptionally vast feature set with real-time performance that pushes the edge of the industry. Creating 3D characters and sets in Maya is like having a cutting-edge film studio on your desktop and at your fingertips-yet all of this power to animate is wrapped in an intuitive interface that actually frees you to concentrate on the creative process. Maya 2 Character Animation covers Maya's advanced features and is a real-world tutorial for serious users. Learn step-by-step techniques for harnessing the awesome power of this tool while creating a variety of realistic talking characters and walking creatures.

About this title

Review

In Maya Character Animation, the technical details of creating believable and engaging characters, from modeling and texturing to adding bone structure and keyframes, are thoroughly explored.

Although Maya can be used for many kinds of 3-D animation, the tutorials in Maya Character Animation are designed for character work that will make your creations walk the walk and talk the talk. The book covers character animation rather than mechanical or effects animation, and the chapters that focus on modeling (chapters 4 through 6) use Maya's NURBS modeling tools. Texture mapping in chapter 7 is also described from the point of view of texturing organic shapes.

Part III covers setting up the character for animation, including skeletal hierarchies, creating keyframes for movement, and facial animation. The character used for these examples is a simply designed cartoon man--but the principles used can be applied to almost any character--and the example face used for facial animation is complex enough to describe the nuances of animating expressions.

While the entire book is lavishly illustrated and written with great attention to detail, the most valuable chapters are the first three, a full third of the book, and they have nothing to do specifically with Maya. Covering such fundamental issues as choosing the right story for the medium, designing characters for 3-D, aspects of storyboarding, and other preproduction issues, this section is invaluable to any budding animator looking to make a film that's more than just eye candy.

The use of Alias Wavefront's Maya for character animation, whether the character is a photorealistic digital stuntman or a three-legged Martian, is growing exponentially. Maya Character Animation clearly explains how to bring your virtual self to life in vivid computer-generated detail. --Mike Caputo

Edition details

• Publisher: New Riders Pub
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0735708665
• ISBN 13: 9780735708662
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 450