Maya 5 Savvy

Rating:
Summary: Great paper, but this book isn't what it promises to be
Review: From the inside of the cover: "... This book is highly recommended to people who are freshly working with 3D animation, 3D artists who have never before worked with Maya, students who use Maya Personal Learning Edition, and even the odd enthusiast who has paid Maya's price to do some serious 3D animation learning"

I worked with form*Z and Blender before, so this shouldn't be a problem for me, I thought. Unfortunately the authors tend to limit some parts of their 900+ pages explanation to a simple remark, like 'Using a selection mask, pick the end hull of the torus and scale it down.' - without telling what where the selection mask can be found, or how to invoke the hull. So then you're stuck and have to get help in another way.

Even the index in the back doesn't mention 'hull', which is one of the basic tools of Maya. This book is focussed on a project (Mighty Muskrat), but it's too bad everything else had to go for it. Pages enough and although the text is a bit to thin to read nicely, the paper is very nice, but that's not why I bought this book.

BTW: Everything on the cd is zipped, wich makes it hard to browse.

Rating:
Summary: way below expectations
Review: This book suffers from bad printing. Good luck trying to interpret the screen grabs from book. At least if they're going to be that bad put some high res versions on the cd.

I agree with the previous reviewer about diluting the book with all of the preliminary stuff about a story, and how to draw. If you're going to struggle to follow the tuts in this book you'd better be way beyond that.

And what's with Sybex's web site with the weird errata for chapter 22? At least I'll never get to chapter 22.

Don't waste your money.

Rating:
Summary: just balancing out the reviews
Review: This is an excellent SECOND Maya book, for use after the introductory tutorials and before the advanced books on specific topics. It's a solid overview of the big Maya topics--modeling, rigging, lighting, keyframe animation, dynamics, particles, MEL. In fact, it's the most comprehensive overview I was able to find.

I read it to get a sense of the big-picture concepts, rather than pick my way through the tutorials themselves. That "Mighty Muskrat" project is pretty lame artistically, but the authors know their stuff technically, and they communicate it very well.

Rating:
Summary: look elsewhere
Review: Yet another book that trys to teach you things you didnt actually buy the book for.Like how to come up with a story and character and how you should develop the character and basic drawing tips.Come on,this is supposed to be about Maya.

Also I like the chapter thats starts out"What is modeling?"
Hmmmm...lets see...I paid a couple of grand for this software...I guess I should learn what exactly modeling is shouldnt I? hmmmmm...what IS modeling?

We know what modeling is already...sheeesh.This book is also very vague at times.Why cant anyone write a tutorial book thats any good? I know they are out there.I'll keep searching and so should you.