Customer Reviews

Maya 4.5 Savvy

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Maya 4.5 Savvy is an outstanding book, although it might not be for everyone it is still a remarkable book. I am fond of the the writing style that has been associated with the publishing company and couldnt wait for the book to publish. The book is organized and enjoyable to read (and im a new to 3d and MAYA). As a student in Florida studying Maya this book has me excited and enthusiastic waiting to get back home and work on it. Other than my cell phone this book is with me at all times. I dont recommend skipping pages unless you are familiar with maya and its tools... example in chapter 12: Binding under creating a rigid skin it asks you to create a nurbs cylinder and increase its scetion to 10 its span to 6 and height to 10 step 2. in the side view create a skelton chain... if you havent read the before pages than can u really complete this excercise... again if you are new to Maya than read this book from Cover to Cover if you are an advance user i believe that this is a great reference tool which is what books are for anyways references. If you would like more info go to the publishes website, there is a pdf sample (as of 02/03)... read it and see if this is something for you... it sold me on the book. 5 STARS

I've been using Maya for 5 years now and bought this book for extra skills. I cannot believe that Alias endorses this. I tried the walk cycle tutorial, which has technical mistakes, if I didn't have the experience I do, I would be completely lost. The hand building tutorial is so cryptic as to where to add faces to the thumb to make it look like the illustration shown that I want to throw the book out the window. I wish I had read these reviews as well, do not buy this book!!!!

I believe this book is great. It covers tons of tools and concepts, but most importantly it covers the "why" aspect of things. Most books and tutorials are just "do this, do this" but never bother to explain "why," this book does a pretty good job on the "why" end of things. I like how the author explains things, easy to follow and very well organized. The index is pretty complete so its easy to look up something that you forget later down the road. It sits on my desk next to my workstation at all times. The book also points out specific features that have been added in 4.5 along the way.

If I had to do it over again, I would be sure to pick this book up.

When I got that book I was really disappointet about its content and design.
I expected a well illustrated book which was supposed to show me some advanced information about Maya's modeling and animation techniques, but I just got some very basic information about different parts of Maya and very poor samples how to use them successfully.
This Book is definitively not useful for advanced Maya users
and also beginners shouldn't find it very helpful.

I should have read all the reviews here before I bought this book this morning. To be honest, the reason I bought it was because the forward is by Danielle Lamothe, who is the education product manager for Alias|Wavefront - in my mind meant that there was some assumption of quality - I was wrong. I sat all afternoon with this book only to discover that the way Maya 4.5 handles dynamics is not the way it is presented in this book - they must have been working with some pre-release version when they wrote the book. I have hit a big brick wall, and the book is useless. It goes back tomorrow.

This is the first time I'm going to write an online review. I bought this. This is a good book to start with when you're learning Maya. This is not for beginners of Maya or 3D animation in general. It tackled most of what you will need to start off in the world of 3D animation (in Maya of course). There are gems in this book that you can actually use. for the reviewer that says don't buy this book because it's the same with Mastering Maya 3 What was keeping me from giving it a 5 star is because it didn't cover the other features of Unlimited (i.e. fur, cloth, live). That really disappointed me. But overall, I can live with this book.

As the reviewer from Germany had stated, - I , too , was greatly disappointed. I am in between a newbie and intermediate user of Maya 4.5 and I expected the book to clarify some issues that were somewhat uneasy for me. Well.
Some books have great tutorials but lack profound detail on each command and each feature , Some other books have a great insight into the most obscure features of a program but intentionally lack of tutorials - That is OK bacause you know that beforehand and probably get to buy them both.

The feeling I have with this book - that it has neither that not the other approach.
when I read it I get to know that Maya can do these and other things but I never get to actually see how. I expected (and maybe I shouldn't have) to learn about some hidden tricks or features in Maya. One of the most important things to me is the REBUILD command or how to correctly use NURBS in Maya (I have used NURBS a lot in RHINO) but it just does not do it in a profound way.

There are also very few images so it doesn't even serve as a visual reference.
Maya is so huge that it is probably obvious that no book can cover it all but not covering the most important parts of Maya ??

I wanted a book that will take me above the huge manuals - This is definetly not the book for the job.

this book is authorized/sponsored by Alias|Wavefront - I can see why - after buying this book you will RUN to buy Alias' books !

SKIP THIS BOOK !

SKIP THIS BOOK AND wait for another

I have most of the Maya books that are out there and this has got to be the worst one I've ever picked up. First of all, this is supposed to be an updated version from the previous book for Maya 3. Just from skimming you can tell that they were very lazy about updating what they wrote because the tutorials don't integrate the new features that Maya has to offer which makes some of the tutorials outdated and frustrating (an example would be the nurbs head tutorial.) They simply lumped some new stuff at the end of the book with a few new paragraphs sprinkled here and there to justify having the title of the book be "Maya 4.5 Savvy". Furthermore, their tutorials are very vague and hard to follow. I have actually seen in some forums people quoting tutorials from this book asking others for explanations when something doesn't go right in the tutorial for them because they can't follow what they're supposed to do.
I think the biggest problem is that this book tries to be so comprehensive that it doesn't do a good job of covering anything. The chapters are too vague and then all of a sudden they expect you to follow their tutorial at the end of the chapter without having decent illustrations or pictures to follow what they are doing.
Most of the books for Maya that are out right now somewhat have this problem but I think this book has to be the worst.For beginners I would reccomend Maya 4.5 Fundamentals for its chapters and tutorials on Modeling. It has a CD included with it that is excellent because it covers all the tutorials step by step and is very easy to follow. It doesn't talk about animation too much though if that is what you are interested in. For an overall introduction to Maya, I would reccomend Learning Maya by Alias Wavefront (although it is pricey) because the tutorials are good and explains why you have to do certain steps instead of just following blindly. However, it's somewhat general and I would only reccomend it for people who are absolute beginners.

For the love of maya, I have embarked upon a crusade to purge the world of any and all copies of this book. The tutorials are hopeless and the content is severely overwhelming. They throw thousands of different concepts and tips at you, but of course don't bother to explain any of them.

Please, everyone.. buy as many copies as you can, then burn them all!

I bought this book and went through most of the chapters. It does cover Maya in great details and takes you through the nitty-gritty steps filling you with every information you need and you do not need. If your idea is to get to use Maya quickly without needing to know about intricate details of the sotware, then look elsewhere. I am a beginner and I can tell that it is not user-friendly. You basically need instructions in the line of "learn maya in 3 hours"style!