Maya 6 for Windows and Macintosh

By Danny Riddell

Imagine being able to add a luscious mane of long, flowing hair to your Maya - created action heroine - and then being able to style it to your heat's desire. With Maya 6, you can do that and a more... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321247469
• ISBN13: 9780321247469
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Peachpit Press
• Length: 556 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Great Buy

This book is awesome. I would recommend this book to anybody who has ever looked at Maya and felt overwhelm by all the menus and features. This book gives you information about the tools and menus and some uses of the tools in plain English with plenty of black and white visuals. I am a novice with Maya and this book is a godsend. I've tried those "learn by following me" books but I would get lost along the way and most of the time I am just mindlessly clicking on stuff. Visual QuickStart Guide for Maya 6 sympathizes with the complete newbie by clearly explaining how things work and in some cases which method is more appropiate. Plus,it is cheaper than the Official Learning Maya books. Note: This Book is a reference so don't expect to learn how to model a character by reading this book. However it is still helpful if you are doing one of those "follow me" tutorials or taking a class and you just need something to fill in the blanks or explain the tools.

Great Book!

This is a great book. You cannot beat the clear and to the point explanations of Maya's features. I really wish the writers would create individual books on Poly modeling and NURBS modeling.

Easy reading and full of useful info

I've used visual quickstarts books to get up to speed quickly on HTML, Photoshop, and CorelDRAW and they've always been a good investment. The Maya 6 visual quickstart follows this pattern. Unlike most Maya books, the quickstart series is not project based, which is one of it's strengths. The book focuses on the interface, tools, and options, which in the long run makes it great reference book. With a project book, you really need to be sitting at the program to make sense of it. With quickstart you can read it pretty much anywhere and gain useful knowledge. Project base books are great, but make sure you have a copy of these book handy for more explanation on tools and options. Since this works as a reference book, it has a much longer shelf life, since you can always come back to it to refresh your memory or look up a question.

A Great Way to Get Started Quickly

Maya is one of the high end 3D graphics modelling packages. This makes it capable of a lot of things, and therefore it has a lot of commands, features and tricks to learn. So many that it is easy to get so far bogged down in minutiae that you forget what you are trying to learn. Enter Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide. Here is a book on Maya that is designed to get you up and being productive in the shortest possible time. That way you are producing things and can show good progress. Later on you can go further into the software to learn how to do those special things that take you further into the innerds of the thing. This book is obviously written by an expert who has spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach this software. The book has two columns on each page with the center column being almost completely illustrations - as the subject says, visual. The outside column then describes what is being done. I find it a great way to learn, you get to doing something quickly which gives you the basic concepts.

quick and thorough

I can only comment on the edition for Maya 5, but after struggling furiously with another so-so book on the app, it came as a huge relief. It's not tutorial-based so much, more goes into specific functions, but it does so efficiently and clearly, with the middle two columns of each spread devoted to illustrations. I went through the book very quickly, and was amazed at the level of competence i attained in this huge beast of a program in very short order. It complements the Maya Foundation book very well; read this one first and then the tutorials in Foundation will just blow by. Tip: sit in a comfortable chair with a highlighter and read through it and mark up anything you want, then go to the computer and review the marked up areas.