Maya Professional Tips and Techniques
Get More Out of Maya in Less Time
Work better and faster in Maya with the quick-hit tips and techniques in this practical book. Designed for busy Maya users, this guide offers dozens of how-tos, workarounds, and shortcuts culled from years of experience in a fast-paced, deadline-driven production pipeline. You'll discover tricks and timesavers on texturing particles, customizing Paint Effects brushes, modeling polygon faces, creating facial rigs with wire deformers, and much more-while useful, full-color illustrations reinforce the concepts. From modeling, animating, and rigging to texturing and lighting, this book will help you streamline workflow and improve your skills.
- Create simple to complex MEL windows
- Master NURBS modeling tricks
- Clean up imported polygons
- Animate realistic camera moves
- Build easy leg and spine controllers
- Combine simple textures for complex results
- Apply naturalistic and HDR lighting techniques
- Import ZBrush displacement and normal maps
- Prep your animation for video or 35mm film
The enclosed CD contains bonus content including valuable Maya demo software, scene files, and texture bitmaps to match many techniques in the book.
Build a polygon head by extruding edges.
Import normal maps from ZBrush to obtain more accurate render detail over bump maps.
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About This Book
Maya Professional Tips and Techniques is divided into 10 chapters. Each chapter contains 6 to 9 sections. Each section covers specific tips or techniques. The contents of each section vary from bullet-point lists of suggestions and specific step-by-step instructions to theoretical explanations. Many sections include sample scene files, which are included on the companion CD.
Since the sections are not dependent upon each other, feel free to skip to the sections that are of the most interest to you. A concentrated effort has been made to include useful tips and techniques that are somewhat obscure or that have been skipped by other books.
The Companion CD
The CD included in the back of this book is an important part of learning with Maya Professional Tips and Techniques. Sample scenes, shading networks, QuickTime movies, HDR files, and texture bitmaps are included to help you perfect your knowledge.
Please note that all scene files have been prepared with Maya 8.0. As such, you may not be able to read them with an older version. The various techniques have been tested with a beta version of Maya 8.5. Minor variations between version 8.0 and 8.5 have been noted.
As for Maya file locations, the traditional directory structure is used. For example, you’ll be able to locate the files as follows:
Project_Files\Chapter_1\scenes holds scene files and shading networks.
Project_Files\Chapter_1\images includes background images and HDR files.
Project_Files\Chapter_1\movies is for sample QuickTime movies.
Project_Files\Chapter_1\textures holds texture bitmaps.
Project_Files\Chapter_1\mel contains MEL scripts.
