Learning Maya 5, w. CD. Character Rigging and Animation [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The reason I bought this book was not to learn "Rigging" or "Animation" as such, but to get a more solid basic understanding of rigging in Maya. After reading the book and doing the exercises, I am pleased to say that I have a deepened and clarified understanding of many aspect of the rigging process in Maya, as I had hoped.

That being said, please do not ONLY read this book! On the "art" side the book is.. well quite awful. If that was just an aesthetic problem it would be ok, but it's not. By "art" I mean everything that is not strictly technical, more or less. Things like the bad and overly subdivided Model, the seemingly low level of understanding and conveying of motion and animation, the lack of consistency and attention to eg. jointplacement, the very bad deformations in the scene files, a lot of "not so good" rigging choices - some of which probably have their root in tradition - and so on.

Still I got a lot of small.. ohh's, some new nice concepts and in general a new sense of being at home as a Maya rigger. The book is generously equipped with video of most of the material covered, scene files+ and a bonus of Learning Maya | Exploring Maya 5 on the accompanying CD's - Nice.

So, buy this book to learn about or solidify your basic Maya rigging skills. For training on rigging and animation(!!) in general, please find your info elsewhere, as this book is not only incomprehensive, naturally due to the scope of the topic, but in my humble opinion also teaches some really bad manners and conveys some approaches that will only make you stray from the path. :)

Web: www.cgtalk.com - Maya rigging forum
Animation: The Animators Survival Kit - A Book

At the time I bought this book, there weren't many books on rigging out there, and rigging seemed to be a "black art" of sorts known only to a relative few. I took the bait and bought the book.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On the positive side, the material presented will actually yield a very versatile and workable rig. The two cd's probably saved this book from the fireplace, and are of great help!

On the down side, there are many things wrong with this book. First and foremost are the numerous bits of misinformation. If you follow this book by the letter, your rig will NOT work as advertised. I had to second guess the book several times. For example, the book tells you to freeze certain channels in order to make a particular controller more user-friendly. The problem is they tell you to freeze the WRONG channels! Much trial and error (not to mention note scribbling, crossing out of bad info, correcting, &c) was required before the rig actually did what it was supposed to do. In some cases, the misinformation was more obvious than in others, but there's really no excuse for this. The animation tutorials are ill-placed and really belong in a seperate book. There are certain methods (ie the rolling foot) which may or may not be to your liking, but one can mix and match when it comes to rigging. Finally, there is the abysmal "Melvin" character which serves as the example throughout the book. Whoever modelled the character needs remedial work in human anatomy, and in general the character is amateurish and unappealing. Instead of using "Melvin", I applied the methods to a character of my own design, and I recommend anyone using this book do the same (unless they don't have a character of their own to work with). The "Melvin" files are useful for study but not much else. Finally, the later chapters are rather confusing. Fortunately, I had other resources available which prevented my efforts from coming to a grinding halt. Smooth skin weighing, for example, is very hard to follow in this book. There are online tutorials which will explain it far better, faster, and more concisely. The final chapters deal with facial animation. I'd just skip these chapters and buy Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" (probably the definitive book on Maya facial modelling and animation at this time).

In combination with other resources, this book IS useful, and again, the CDs that come with it are informative (you can dissect them to your heart's content). By itself, however, it only gets half the job done, and not very well at that. Alias Wavefront can certainly do a little better with this subject in the future...

Actually, I'm quite pleased with this one. Alright, it's not the best book about 3d I've ever read, but if you want to learn how to set up your characters and how to build logical control systems in Maya, it's awesome. I really loved that you're not "alone" - The book ships with 2 DVDs, with extensive Video Coverage (unfortunately in quite bad quality) and shows you exactly how you're dealing with problems.

Well, if you want to learn how to rig characters in Maya, this is the book for you. But if you want to learn how to create nifty animations and already know everything you need to know about Rigging - You'll make a mistake with buying this book!

One last thing about the sample files: The sample data is awful. You'll rig a character model that's not even third rate (actually, it's converted from NURBS to Polygons) and therefore it's a lot more techical than many of you would prefer...