| Many years ago, I was a frustrated software engineer working in Silicon Valley. I was in a very technical field, which I enjoyed, but I also had a strong desire to exercise my artistic side. Writing code for UNIX workstations just didn’t satisfy that. I loved cartoons, so I decided to take the plunge and learn animation by taking some night courses at a local college. Even back then, when I was learning to draw animation a frame at a time, I found it to be a great balance of right- and left-brain activities. You could get a good creative rightbrain rush by drawing lots and lots of pictures, but there were also the technical left brain tasks of making those images move and bringing them to the screen.
As computers started to work their way into the animation world, I found that this creative/ technical split became even more pronounced. People were either programmers or artists, but there were very few who knew both. Soon packages like Maya came along that helped bridge that gap. Maya is the perfect package for confused right/left-brain types such as myself. Maya can be as technical as you would ever want, yet it still allows an artist to easily create stunningly beautiful images.
For the artist, learning something as technical as Maya can seem daunting, and for technical people, creating a beautiful image can be challenging. Hopefully, this book will bridge more of the gap by providing much of its information visually. Since Maya is geared towards the visual arts, we thought that a highly visual book would appeal to those who use the Maya by explaining this somewhat technical topic in a visual language that is easy to understand.
This book is certainly not an encyclopedia of Maya, but as its cover says, it shows you all of the major features of Maya “at a glance.” Although the book is compact, we’ve tried to pack a lot of good information on Maya into a small space. You should be able to flip open the book and see most of the pertinent information on a topic within a single set of pages. For those just learning Maya, I have also added tutorials at the end of each chapter to give you hands-on coverage of some of the more important tasks covered in the book. By reading through each chapter and working through the tutorials, Maya at a Glance can also be used as in introductory course for those learning Maya.
Ideally, this book will appeal to those just getting started in Maya as well as those with experience who need a handy reference. Whatever category you fall into, I hope you enjoy Maya at a Glance.Your Visual Guide to Maya |
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