What is a good tutorial resource for maya? I am not new to 3D at all but Maya basics are ailen to me. I already spent all my budget on software. Where is a good website to learn from?
I always recommend this DVD as a Maya training source. It’s only $25 so it’s really worth it:
http://store.alias.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10?V1=780718&PN=1&SP=10023&xid=41107&CID=154297&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&ABCODE=&CACHE_ID=154297
I’ve not really used this site, but it has been recommended to me in the past:
Thanks.
Also consider these sites:
http://www.learning-maya.com/ - Start with ‘Tutorial Links’. The rest of the site is great, and chock-full of links to other places.
http://www.highend3d.com/ - A good ‘generalist’ site for 3D applications. Good forums, and links to useful plugins, etc, for your 3D app of choice. Mostly covers the ‘High End’ apps.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/ - Arguably, one of the best forums on the net dedicated to digital graphics work of any kind. Covers all manner of 2D / 3D art, game, and movie production topics in the CG realm. There are forums specific to most every popular application. The community keeps this place alive with great links, works to show off, and advice from newbies to pros.
-Gary
Along with all the great web resorces, if you can afford one book to read that deals with Maya and game development it’s “Discover the Game with Alias”. It’s one of the few software books I’ve found that isn’t just a gloss over of general topics. It really gets into the nitty gritty, and also has several well done video tuts that go along with it. I think it was $37.95 on Amazon. It goes into MotionBuilder in the last chapter, but the Maya stuff is golden.
HTH
I got this book on your suggestion, haven’t gotten to go through it yet seeing as I’m working through “The Game Artist Guide to Maya” but it looks a lot more thorough than the one I just mentioned. Jeff
Yeah,“The Game Artist Guide to Maya” goes through the whole character setup, which seems really good… didn’t buy it, but sat in Border’s for an hour with it and learned some techniques 
I forgot to say before that most of these books generalize too much because they’re not about what we’re interested in involving Realtime 3D… so Subdivs, Nurbs, MentalRay gibberish is all handled in basic terms to give an overall view of what Maya can do (and it’s great stuff to get aquainted with Maya) but what we need is pure polygonal modeling, UV mapping, effeciency techniques etc… “Discover the Game with Alias” is one I can truly recommend for this and worth buying to sit down and go through the lessons. Another good book to go to Border’s and browse through is “Creating the Art of the Game”. A lot of good general info for 3D artists getting into games, basic tricks and workarounds for situations we all run into.
[Edit] Just to be fair to Alias, the HTML help system included with Maya is phenomenal for starting out learning the program. The only trick is knowing the keyword to the function your trying to accomplish… which is a bit of a catch 22
I actually saw that book and bought it already. I flipped through it and was amazed.
Does it go over any of the surface sampler tools? It would be great if it did. My purchase of maya was greatly persauded by the demo of their surface sampler tool set. Thats truly where the future of game graphics lie, imho.
Thanks a lot
Bill
No, unfortunately it doesn’t even touch on this at all since it goes through low poly modeling and not really discussing normal map generation from a higher res model. I’m still on Maya 6.5 myself so I didn’t even miss that feature until you mentioned it… thanks a lot
Hmmm, my piggy bank looks a little anorexic at the moment :roll:
I think what this book does best is try to bring you up to speed on a lot of how console games have been created in this generation (PS2, GC, XBOX). A lot of tricks that have been worked out, but it honestly doesn’t go into what’s going on “right now” or what’s around the corner.
And I just thought I’d mention another book that blew me away today at Border’s… “Game Character Development with Maya”. The first section of “Discover…” deals with character creation, but if characters are your focus than “GCDWM” is a phonebook thick book full of goodies.