Learning Maya

[crassus 0]

I've started researching some books on learning Maya, but am not meeting with much success, as reviews of the books differ greatly.

I'm hoping to find a consensus on a few good titles from which to learn Maya.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Llauma 0]

I've started researching some books on learning Maya, but am not meeting with much success, as reviews of the books differ greatly.

I'm hoping to find a consensus on a few good titles from which to learn Maya.

Thanks in advance for any help.  

Practise, practise and more practise by yourself..

Sorry, I don't know any titles but I know you'll learn alot by playing around in Maya.

[svendejong 0]

There exist some great books on moddeling, creating shadernetworks, dynamic simulations etc etc so it really depends really on what are you planning to do with it.

[Colossus 2]

Have you seen this?

I must say that the program looks great!

What movies was made with Maya again? Final Fantasy wasn't it?

[svendejong 0]

Big visual effect movies arent made with one piece of 3d software.

A combination of off the shelve and proprietary software is used in combination with compositing software like shake and nuke in order to speed up the production proces.

But aside from that; maya is a great 3d package (I would recommand you use mental ray to render unless you can afford pixars renderman because the standard maya renderer is crap)

and a lot of online (from free to expensive) are available.

[crassus 0]

Thanks all, for you replies.

As I said, some of the reviews for the books teaching Maya, have gotten mixed reviews, very often in the place, i.e. Amazon's readers' reviews. I know that no one book can teach anything, so one must learn from a variety and quantity of sources. But at the same time, I don't want to waste my time and money on titles of dubious benefit, hence my request here.

I've just begun the Tutorials contained within Maya itself, but those will of course cover only so much material.

[KJAM 0]

Take a look at

Renderosity

a large 3d dedicated community, multiple tutorials and im sure if you ask nice enough someone will give you a hand

[SpecOp9 0]

I'm glad Maya was made free...but I find myself frequently working with Oxygen for modeling alot more often. Knowing that I only really do simple crap like objects.

It's always good to to get a jump start at stuff like modeling with Maya and 3DS max... mostly at my age..would look good heading into college

[Colossus 2]

@ Nov. 02 2004,17:46)]Big visual effect movies arent made with one piece of 3d software.

A combination of off the shelve and proprietary software is used in combination with compositing software like shake and nuke in order to speed up the production proces.

But aside from that; maya is a great 3d package (I would recommand you use mental ray to render unless you can afford pixars renderman because the standard maya renderer is crap)

and a lot of online (from free to expensive) are available.

Sorry m8, I was thinking about Pixar's Renderman