Maya 2 Character Animation

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, but also not very good
Review: Bill Fleming always says that modeling with polygons is better than nurbs. Why is this I didn't know, until I read this book. The fact is you learn a lot of good modeling, but the hard way. Sure the book has great info, but impractical if you want to get in the business of 3d. You can't waste your time modeling like it teaches you while you know you can do a good job in a lot less time with another technique. Be practical.

Rating:
Summary: Masters of Disaster
Review: Fine --- the writers are "experts" of Character Animation, but before you release a book, I think that you should have placed a little more emphasis on the make up of the book and the quality of the information provided. After spending hours upon hours going through some of the exercises, it dawned on me that their procedures were way undereffective (is this even a word!) and outdated. Be warned -- this is a complete waste of valuable money. There are many other resources for building realistic characters out there.

I do however praise the authors for coming out with a book dedicated to modeling characters. A great step forward, but with careless steps.

Rating:
Summary: Strange : I like it...
Review: First I got to say this book has lot of bugs, and I wouldnt model any character the way they learn... On the other side there are some good Chapters that I like, FE: "Creating Story concepts" , "Designing Character" and " Designing story boards.. This is one of most important thing in creating animation and lot of people ignore this part. When you are going to spend hours on modeling and animating its good idea to design good characters and interesting story board first... For me this chapter is great... I like chapters about character and face animation too, there are some bugs but I think they got lot of usefull info and for me is quite easy to folow them...

Ok so what is the ressult? I like about 40% of this book a lot, the other part is quite confusing and not very professional in my eyes....

I would recomend " Mastering Maya complete" series and "Art of Maya" from AW. First one is great for learning, the second one is beautifull overview of maya functions with lot of nice pictures and examples how to use them ....

Rating:
Summary: Strange : I like it...
Review: First I got to say this book has lot of bugs, and I wouldnt model any character the way they learn... On the other side there are some good Chapters that I like, FE: "Creating Story concepts" , "Designing Character" and " Designing story boards.. This is one of most important thing in creating animation and lot of people ignore this part. When you are going to spend hours on modeling and animating its good idea to design good characters and interesting story board first... For me this chapter is great... I like chapters about character and face animation too, there are some bugs but I think they got lot of usefull info and for me is quite easy to folow them...

Ok so what is the ressult? I like about 40% of this book a lot, the other part is quite confusing and not very professional in my eyes....

I would recomend " Mastering Maya complete" series and "Art of Maya" from AW. First one is great for learning, the second one is beautifull overview of maya functions with lot of nice pictures and examples how to use them ....

Rating:
Summary: This is NOT a waste of paper!
Review: I have found this book to be a well rounded introduction to the character animation process. It is comprehensive and outlines an abundance of techniques to use for every step from start to finish. It can be a little confusing at times, as maya often can be to beginners, but it has succeeded in considerably expanding my knowledge of techniques and processes in Maya.

Maya is an incredibly sophisticated piece of software and there are several methods of accomplishing similar results within the environment. It would be impossible to cover every method or teach every technique and tool in a single book. This is *not* the "How to do Everything in Maya in a Day" book, if that's what you're looking for. Instead, as the cover does indicate, it is a guide through a tried and true process of character development and animation written by award winning artists who have graciously recorded their knowledge to share with aspiring 3d hackers.

Rating:
Summary: Unlock your imagination with Maya and this Book
Review: Maya 2.0 Character Animation was created by international award winning artists who have been using computer computer graphics software as part of their graphics arsenal since before the 90's. These pioneers have poured their hearts and minds into designing a creative process that leads you through the essential steps necessary to realize characters with depth and personality ready for your own engaging adventures.

The book consists of several stages of design that are presented as a series of step by step tutorials. Each stage leads to the next until you are introduced to all of the stages of character design and realization.

Chapters 1,2,3 written by Sherri Sheridan

These essential first few chapters set down the foundation for a truly life like character to be created, no matter if it is a hand drawn comic strip to a full feature motion picture epic, live action or animated. They cover character design story concepts and visual story telling. Many excercises and concepts are presented that can be used for any sort of character design.

Chapters 4,5,6,7 written by Nathan Vogel

Chapters 4,5 and 6 cover in step by step detailed tutorials several techniques for modeling realisticly detailed, resolution independant, seamless organic character using NURBS geometry.

Chapter 7 is a double size chapter introducing many useful texture mapping techniques and tools with many step by step techniques including several new Maya 2.0 features.

Ch 8 Lights and Cameras is written by Kevin Cain Director of the MFA dept at Academy of Art College and is a master of stage and 3D lighting. It includes special mel scripts that allow you to do lighting effects in Photoshop and apply them to your Maya environment

Ch 9, 10, 11 are written by Tim Coleman a leader in the Character Animation Training and Production world. His chapters show in depth how to set up and animate characters in Maya including an in depth chapter (11) on facial animation.

The CD-ROM has lots of great tutorials and free stuff including Maya project files, textures, demo plugins and much more. It also has a whole chapter on MelScripting for character animation and a pulugins chapter.

This book is great for everyone intrested in character animation and Maya whether you are a seasoned pro or a student.

Highly recommended useful handbook!

Rating:
Summary: Great resource, a few flaws
Review: Okay, this book does have a lot to go for it. The first few chapters are completely dedicated to helping animators create a solid story for their demo reels. Invaluable information right there!

Then the author moves on to modeling. This book teaches ONLY nurbs techniques, so if you're not interested in learning nurbs or already know how, I really recommend that you purchase Maya Illuminated: Games!, it will teach you how to use polygons instead. The good thing about this book teaching you only nurbs is that it really goes in depth instead of skimming through valuable techniques.

This book will of course teach you how to apply textures to your nurbs models, so that's a nice plus.

Then it will teach you everything you need to know about rigging your models for animation. This is probably one of the best parts of the book, simply because there are VERY few tutorials out there for Maya on how to rig anything...

The flaws to this book.

It tries to teach lighting... if you want to learn how to properly light your scenes, buy the now very popular Digital Lighting and Rendering. It will teach you the PROPER way to light your scenes. You can tell from this Maya 2 character animation book that lighting wasn't the author's specialty. Either that or he didn't feel like making it worth much. The scenes the author shows as lighting examples are very badly lit.

Another thing is that it's hard to read this book. I don't spend hours on end reading this cause there's a lot of theory and explaining.

Otherwise, great book. I would recommend this book if you need to learn how to really learn how to model with nurbs, how to rig your models and how to create solid stories for animation.

Rating:
Summary: "EXPERTS"?
Review: This book is a absoluetly a wrong book. I was very tensed to take a look(rather a glance) for the amazing cover character, but when I bought this book, wrong and ugly character was shown for describing character modeling. No eye building details, No apologizing comment about wrong character using. This book is impossible. I can't believe it!