Welcome to Introducing Autodesk Maya 2012 and the world of computer-generatedimagery (CGI). Whether you’re new to 3D graphics or venturing into Autodesk’spowerhouse animation software from another 3D application, you’ll find this book aperfect primer. It introduces you to Maya and shows how you can work with Maya tocreate your art, whether it’s animated or static in design.

The first edition of this book was written out of the author’s desire for a solid,comprehensive, and yet open-ended teaching material about Maya for his classes.This book exposes you to all the facets of Maya by introducing and explaining itstools and functions to help you understand how Maya operates. In addition, you’llfind hands-on examples and tutorials that give you firsthand experience with thetoolsets. Working through these will help you develop skills as well as knowledge.These tutorials expose you to various ways of accomplishing tasks with this intricateand comprehensive artistic tool.

Finally, this book explains workflow. You’ll learn not only how specific tasks areaccomplished, but why—that is, how they fit into the larger process of producing 3Danimation. By doing that, these chapters should give you the confidence to venturedeeper into Maya’s feature set on your own or by using any of Maya’s other learningtools and books as a guide.

It can be frustrating to learn a powerful tool such as Maya, so it’s important toremember to pace yourself. The number-one complaint of readers of books like this isa sense that either the pace is too fast or the steps are too complicated oroverwhelming. That’s a tough nut to crack, to be sure, and no two readers are thesame. But this book offers you the chance to run things at your own pace. Theexercises and steps may seem challenging at times, but keep in mind that the moreyou try—even the more you fail at some attempts—the more you’ll learn about howto operate Maya. Experience is the key to learning workflows in any softwareprogram, and with experience comes failure and aggravation. Nevertheless, try andtry again, and you’ll see that further attempts will be easier and more fruitful.Above all, this book aims to inspire you to use Maya as a creative tool to achieveand explore your own artistic vision.