[Eric Luhta,Kenny Roy]How to Cheat in Maya 2012 Tools and Techniques for Character Animation(pdf){Zzzzz}

The Maya guide for animators, How to Cheat in Maya 2012 presents everything you need to know about character animation in Maya. Fully updated for the latest revision of Maya, this book provides you with complete, step-by-step walkthroughs of essential animation techniques to increase your efficiency and speed. This is an animator's workflow in book form, written by professional animators-not a software book with a few animation pointers thrown in.

In addition to all the gold-mine coverage and interviews with expert animators from the previous edition, How to Cheat in Maya 2012 also features a new in-depth chapter on the principles of animation, updated information on camera settings and animation using Maya's new Camera Sequencer tool, the ins and outs of the brand new Editable Motion Trails tool, new techniques for working with characters in multi-shot animation tests and short films, a new cycles chapter covering actions like flying and walks, time-saving scripts, and advanced tricks with the new Graph Editor. The proven "How to Cheat" series gets you up to speed quickly, and in a way that's fun.

Publisher: Focal Press; 1 edition (July 20, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0240816986
ISBN-13: 978-0240816982

From the Back Cover

The Maya guide for animators, How to Cheat in Maya 2012 presents everything you need to know about character animation in Maya. Fully updated for the latest revision of Maya, this book provides you with complete, step-by-step walkthroughs of essential animation techniques to increase your efficiency and speed. This is an animator's workflow in book form, written by professional animators-not a software book with a few animation pointers thrown in.

In addition to all the gold-mine coverage and interviews with expert animators from the previous edition, How to Cheat in Maya 2012 also features a new in-depth chapter on the principles of animation, updated information on camera settings and animation using Maya's new Camera Sequencer tool, the ins and outs of the brand new Editable Motion Trails tool, new techniques for working with characters in multi-shot animation tests and short films, a new cycles chapter covering actions like flying and walks, time-saving scripts, and advanced tricks with the new Graph Editor. The proven "How to Cheat" series gets you up to speed quickly, and in a way that's fun.

How to Cheat in Maya 2012 gives you access to a powerful website (http://www.howtocheatinmaya.com) that includes:

All exercise/example scene files

Video tutorials to help you apply cutting-edge, professional techniques to your own animations

Animation files with new cheats

All materials from the previous edition of the book

About the Author
Eric Luhta is a professional animator whose recent credits include "Bioshock 2", "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs", "Horton Hears A Who!", and numerous television commercials. Eric has extensive experience with Autodesk's Maya, including teaching it, as an instructor for the Maya Training Program at AnimationMentor.com. He currently lives in Los Angeles, CA with his wife and 3 computers.
Kenny Roy entered the animation industry in 1998 and has animated on feature films, television, commercials and rides, and started his very own animation studio in Los Angeles, CA. Now in its 6th year of operation, Arconyx Animation Studios has worked with clients Nickelodeon to Cartoon Network, Fox to Mattel. Kenny has mentored full time at AnimationMentor.com for 6 years, and also offers in-depth animation video training on his personal website, www.kennyroy.com. He lives in LA with his wife and son.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

A good choice for learning more about animation techniques
By Timothy Lovett VINE VOICE on September 13, 2011
First, I need to make a confession: I own the how to cheat in maya 2010 book. I bought it a year or so ago and used it to learn about the different animation techniques the author used to speed up their production life-cycle.

That said, I was impressed that the newer edition actually had significant changes compared to the last edition and all of the material was up to date. One of the notorious things you'll find with these maya books is that authors often just repackage their old works from an older version of maya and publish it as is with a new section not updating it to reflect deprecated features and changed UI. It was fairly clear going through that it was updated fully, however. For example, aside from the new cleaner looking page layout all of the images were redone with the latest version of Maya so it was evident the author went through and completely went through each step by step (I only briefly looked over some of the older tricks but they looked like they were updated text wise to reflect it as well).

Anyhow, I'll let the other reviewers specifically speak to the content but wanted to point out that the book is a fully color wonderful learning tool for maya animators who really want to improve their work and their flow.


Learn Animation techniques with Maya
By Dr. Bojan Tunguz HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWER on October 17, 2011
Maya is 3D computer graphics software, used widely for a variety of special effects, ranging from video games to full-blown feature films. It is developed and marketed by Autodesk, and it has become one of the standard tools in the professional animation and graphics circles. Maya 2012 is, as of this writing, the latest iteration of this software package.

Maya is tremendously powerful software, and its user-interface dwarfs most other similar ones for the lower-level graphical applications. If you are new to Maya, your first encounter with it can be extremely intimidating. It takes a while to get the feel for your way around, but fortunately there are many good books and online resources that will help you with this.

"Cheating in Maya 2012" is a book of tips and tricks that can help you become a better animator with Maya 2012. It is not a book that will teach you how to use Maya, so you should find another resource for this basic information. However, if you have already mastered the use of Maya, then this book is an excellent resource for learning the fundamentals of 3D animation.

The book comes with an accompanying website, where you can find and download many of the files and examples that are used throughout. Some of the files used in the examples are actually named differently than the ones in the book. For the most part it is easy to figure out which file the authors had in mind, but being a bit more careful about this point would have helped.

The chapters and examples are arranged sequentially in terms of their complexity. Some of the material in the more advanced chapters depends on what was covered earlier, but for the most part you can jump around the book and learn those tricks that are particularly interesting to you

A good intermediate book for Maya ANIMATORS.
By C.J. Hustwick VINE VOICE on October 8, 2011
This is a clearly written and illustrated book which explains many of the methods to manipulate animation through Maya's multiple editors and extensive tools. It most certainly focused on character animation, which is Maya's strength, and could be inferred through the cover although the "how to cheat" portion of title is about 10x larger than the subtitle indicating the book's content.

Luhta & Roy's book is organized into sections dealing with Splines, Gimbal Locks, Blocking, and other aspects of the animation workflow. They assume you already have a good working knowledge of Maya and their pithy, 2-page treatments of individual topics are just enough to give a few pointers and not a whole lot more. That's why I am not a big fan of these "cheating" books because ultimately they just bombard the reader with tons of miniature lessons that are of value only to students with a comprehensive knowledge of the program already, in which case a book like this will only be used piecemeal. Still, it is a superior example of the "cheater" books, and Animation is one area of Maya where little tricks can have a direct impact on workflow.