Maya is the high-end tool responsible for bringing to life many of the 3Dhumans, animals, plants, cars, and machines you see in film, videos, andgames. This all-in-one modeling and rendering package is a favorite amonganimators, thanks to its extensive tool set, speed, and easy extensibility.Maya: Visual QuickStart Guide walks you through the program'selementary theory, interface, and features--there's no quicker, easier wayto get up and running with Maya.

Maya: Visual QuickStart Guide's task-based format makes it both aneasy-to-follow introduction for beginners and an indispensablequick-reference guide for more seasoned users, who can use the page tabs toskip straight to specific topics. No wordy explanations here; each task isbroken down into simple, concise steps, accompanied by numerous screenshotsto keep you on track as you work. With Maya: Visual QuickStartGuide, you'll be producing professional-looking 3D models, texturedobjects, and animations in no time.

Amazon.com Review
Maya is not a program to be taken lightly or learned in a day, but the Maya Visual QuickStart Guide is probably one of the best ways to get started. For users with some 3-D experience, this easily digested book introduces Maya and its feature set without overwhelming the reader.

Over 300 pages and 14 chapters, Maya (version 3.5 for Mac, version 4 for Windows) is cleanly deconstructed. The first part of the book focuses on the Maya interface, the plethora of windows and graphs, setting preferences, customizing the interface, and the basics of moving around the application. The "Creating Primitives and Text" section describes the basics of object creation, while subsequent chapters discuss object manipulation, hierarchies, object types, building a model for animation, creating key frames, and finally, rendering the finished product.

If there is a drawback to this fine introductory book, it is that it is too short. Maya offers an incredibly rich and deep feature set, and careers are built on learning to use only subsets of the whole. This book serves as an invaluable introduction for the new Maya user and offers a solid foundation on which to grow. It presents the Maya paradigm in a clear light, and we'd like to see more of Maya's advanced features presented in such a concise manner.

The Maya Visual QuickStart Guide is one of the best ways to learn to use Maya, and it should come bundled with every copy of the program. --Mike Caputo