Essential skills.- Refinements.- Intermediate skills.- Adding character.- Wiring things up.- Bringing it all together.- Index.

Many animators and designers would like to supplement their Maya learning with a less-technical, more helpful book. This self-study manual is both a general guide for understanding 3-D computer graphics and a specific guide for learning the fundamentals of Maya: workspace, modeling, animation, shading, lighting, and rendering. Understanding 3-D Animation Using Maya covers these fundamentals in each chapter so that readers gain increasingly detailed knowledge. After an initial 'concepts' section launches each chapter, hands-on tutorials are provided, as well as a chapter project that progressively adds newly learned material and culminates in the final animated short. This is the first book on Maya that teaches the subject using a sensible, proven methodology for both novices and intermediate users. Topics and features: - Proven method that emphasizes preliminaries to every chapter- Integrates the why concepts of 3-D simultaneously with the how-to techniques- Skills reinforced with tutorials and chapter projects- Real-world experience distilled into helpful hints and step-by-step guides for common tasks- CD-ROM with practice animations, case studies and additional methods