Learning Maya 6: Foundation

The reason this book is terrific is the variety in what it shows you. You get a very well-rounded instruction on the principles of this 3D software package. What’s better, you’re shown several ways to accomplish the same thing. For example, in one lesson you may keyframe the x-axis in the channel box while in the next lesson you do it in the attribute window. Also, common commands are sometimes accessed in the hotbox and sometimes they’re accessed via the menu. I felt like this was very deliberate and kudos to the folks who wrote and organized this stuff, because it’s not easy to do. Therein lies the largest strength of this book.

A tutorial book is never about showing you how to put awesome projects together (although I enjoyed the ones in this book), it’s about presenting the instruction to you in a way that makes you understand why you’re doing those things. It’s this very point where many other books fall short in some way, even others by Sybex. Their goal was to instruct. Period. It shows.

Their accompanying DVD was easy to understand because the projects were in a directory structure that made sense (in contrast to how some of the older Sybex books organized their Maya projects) and the overviews (videos included in the DVD) were helpful. These video overviews covered the more complicated points of each lesson and were invaluable to me. They could’ve redone each step in each lesson and I’m actually glad they didn’t. By only going over the important (and more complex) steps of the lesson it brought to the forefront the difficult concepts and made them more clear.

My last point I’ll make is the training “path” they offer in the back of the book. One danger an artist like myself may run into by learning from 3rd party books is learning the material in a discombobulated fashion – sure I’ve learned dynamics real well but I still don’t know how to model and my animation skills are weak. Alias’ training path offers a concrete direction to go in once one book is completed. Yes it’s a shameless self-promotion but it’s also a good thing for us budding 3D artists.

SUMMARY This book gets a guiltless 5 cows for its concise, well-rounded instruction and excellent organization. The group of people in charge of this book (and I hope the rest of the series is just as capable) really had their ducks in a row when they worked on this. A homerun from a company who I hope will do well in their future software and instruction.