 |
Description
|
Sybex’s Maya Visual Effects Survival Kit: Clever Solutions to Professional Challenges + CD takes a “MacGyver” type approach: Readers will learn how to create visual effects and solve animation problems as if they were tied up in a basement with dynamite strapped to their chest, and only a pocketknife, a stick of gum, and a computer with Maya installed as the sole animation software package to set them free. The goal is to achieve a deeper understanding of the software by using specific tools in unique ways, such as: ramp textures (including animating eyes, UFOs, a swarm of flies, and flesh eating bacteria), particles (using Paint Effects, cameras, and textures), joints (mastering cameras, lattices, splines, IK), blendshapes (how-to’s for facial animation, soft bodies, triggering weights), custom tools (curves, surfaces, polys), and more.
In an actual, professional production pipeline, working with Maya is seldom a step-by-step, by-the-numbers process. Art directors often give professional Maya animators a few storyboards and a description of what the animation or effect will be (maybe as little as a post-it note with a quick sketch) but they are not always equipped to tell you how to achieve the desired result. So you have to think like an inventor.
Maya’s flexible toolset makes this possible, and even enjoyable. To reach the point where you can use Maya to invent your own animation solutions, you have to get beyond the more common solutions and start thinking more creatively. Maya Visual Effects Survival Kit presents tutorials using several of Maya’s tools in ways designed to inspire the artist to approach animation in a problem-solving manner. Professional Maya artist Eric Keller has developed many of these techniques in professional effects and animation situations that required inspired solutions.
|
Shopping Cart
My Account
Help
Contact Us 
