| Learning Maya 5, Character Rigging and Animation is an official learning resource brought to you by the folks at Alias. The book teaches you, step by step, how to rig up a character in any number of ways, set controls for it, and animate your character. The book is fairly basic, rigging a humanoid character (in this case named Melvin) and putting him through some basic animation paces to ensure the rig is usable. Here you'll learn how to set up a bipedal skeleton. Rig it with inverse kinematics and set constraints. It'll teach you how to use the IK spline solver, as well as show you how to set up an FK/IK system. Additionally, it covers how to set up proxy geometry, low resolution geometry for animating which will later get swapped out for the high resolution mesh. Though the book does say Character Rigging and Animation, it will teach you how to animate with Maya 5, it won't teach you how to actually animate, that you have to learn for yourself. Indeed, the animation presented in the book, while serviceable for teaching purposes, is quite hideous. You'll learn how to appropriately set up complicated skeleton hierarchies like those found in the hands, and how to set up an effective control system to manipulate them. The book runs through Smooth skinning, and using influence objects for better deformation of the mesh. Additionally, it teaches you rigid skinning techniques, and how to bind the mesh to a lattice for additional deformation control. It also teaches you how to use set membership (selection sets) to add additional control and restrictions to how your deformers affect the mesh. Finally, it'll show you how to use flexors and blend shape effectively to give you even better deformation with problem joints and muscles. A quick chapter is also devoted to facial animation setup, which in this book is done through blend shape (morph targets). The appendices are some of the most useful sections of the book, teaching you about Quarternion space, (resisting gimbal lock) and how to set up an FK/IK leg chain. The book comes with a CD with supporting material a as well as a DVD which provides chapter overviews. Basically the essential concepts presented in the book done in video form. Very cool if you learn best in that format. The DVD also contains the Exploring Maya 5 Features, which introduces you to all the new power in Maya 5. This book comes with a hefty price however for offering all of this content on multiple formats. The suggested retail is $60.00 US, and at 336 pages, is steep. My suggestion, buy direct from Sybex (www.sybex.com) where they're offering 30% off their Learning Maya 5 product line. This brings the price down to a much more reasonable $42.00. Learning Maya 5, Character Rigging and Animation is a solid learning resource that will get you through the complete process of rigging a character and ensuring that it deforms properly using the myriad of tools under your control in Maya 5. The writing style is basic, but clearly defined, and you should have no trouble at all following the instruction, or finding the appropriate tool in Maya. Despite this, I must raise issue with the inclusion of "Animation" in the title. There is a chapter devoted to animation, a kick the can exercise where they've provided video clips of someone actually kicking a can to help you out. But the animation instruction is extremely basic, taught simply for the purpose of ensuring that the rig is functional. Learn your animation elsewhere, Sybex offers other books that will actually teach you animation as applied to Maya. Finally, with all the slick packaging of Maya, the completeness of their education marketing scheme, you would think that they would do their best to provide attractive examples. Unfortunately however, your rigging instruction through 337 pages is taught with the aid of Melvin, definitively one of the ugliest 3D characters ever to grace the cover of a book. Learning basic principals does not mean you have to try and win an ugly contest. Marketed towards the intermediate crowd, Learning Maya 5, Character Rigging and Animation is an excellent resource for intermediate 3D users and advanced users of other software who are picking up Maya for the first time. Though ugly, there are solid learning principals presented in clear tutorial form for you to follow along with in both video and text format. www.sybex.com |