Maya Character Animation, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Not the best as stated!
Review: I really would not call this the best Maya 5 book. I definitely commend the author on giving us color images throughout the book but as it mentions on the cover it is for the more advanced users of Maya. In no way is this book intended for the beginner to intermediate level. Once you have good experience with Maya character animation then move to this book.

Rating:
Summary: Best Maya 5 Book Out There...
Review: I was about to buy the first edition of this book, until I heard about the impending second, which was literally just published in March 2004 (and the cover that Amazon.com shows is slightly incorrect; the sax player is replaced with another character, but, oddly, the background is exactly the same).

The major plus I have to give this book is the sheer fact that everything is in *color,* and it is neither too basic, nor too advanced. There are plenty of step-by-step tutorials for everything from modeling to animation.

I have only really scratched the surface of this book (after all, it was only recently published), and if you're savvy enough to have found this book here in Amazon.com (searching for "Maya Character Animation" only yields the first edition of this book; I clicked on the author's name to find the 2nd edition), I would certainly suggest picking it up. If you only buy one intermediate-to-advanced Maya 5 book, then I'd suggest this one.

Rating:
Summary: Not for the Newbie
Review: If you're looking for something to introduce you Maya... this ain't it. It is however one of the most informative books I've found on building characters using NURBS and Subdiv modelling alon with excellent sections on rigging and binding. The texturing section could use a little extra work, but for what this book does that's just niggling. Readers should be warned that the author's native tongue is probably not english, so there will be occasional phrasing that may read oddly. Great book for intermediate and advanced Maya users. Definitely not for the newbie.

Rating:
Summary: Reference Book with some tutorials
Review: This books seems to me more like a Maya Reference Book than a How to Book. I did not like the style the book was written in. There would be tool introductions and details for while and than a tutorial later on. The Writing seemed very dis-jointed to me.The tutorials were often hard to follow along with and the models in the pictures were hard to duplicate because the pictures usually mediocre or didn't cover all the angles. The Tool descriptions fill a lot of the book and weren't great. Basically, If you don't know how to use the tool already than the defenitions aren't in depth enough to help much; if you do know the tools than there is no reason to read the tool info in the book so I have no idea what group this book is trying to cater too.