Maya Featuring Creature Creations (Graphics Series) [Paperback]

Todd Palamar (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1584502258 | ISBN-13: 978-1584502258 | Publication Date: July 30, 2002 | Edition: 1

The days of unrealistic, herky-jerky monsters, aliens, and Godzillas are gone, thanks to the power of programs like Maya. With this state-of-the-art application, you can create fantastically real creatures to take on starring roles or just traumatize other characters in a movie. Maya Feature Creature Creations teaches the fundamentals of how to develop, create, and implement your own next generation computer generated character. Written for 3D artists and modelers of all levels with a solid understanding of Maya, the book provides an easy-to-follow process for building an anatomy based CG character with physics-driven, elastic skin. Upon completing this book, you'll walk away with a character that was sculpted in clay and modeled with subdivision surfaces using Maya. You can easily modify this creature for own purposes and use the skills and techniques you learned to create a variety of other Hollywood-quality characters.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Todd Palamar began his career creating traditional special effects for low budget horror movies. Self-taught and passionate about stop motion animation, he quickly gravitated to computer animation. After working on numerous straight-to-video movies, he switched gears and entered the video game industry. Todd's first game release was Behind Enemy Lines, a coin operated arcade game for Sega of Japan. His next "shipped" title was the Die Hard 2 Trilogy, followed by Dukes of Hazard, Trophy Buck 2, and Trophy Bear. Todd spent the next 6 years teaching at Full Sail in Winter Park, FL. While there, he won the honor of "Outstanding Educator" for two consecutive years, and was nominated twice for the prestigious Top Gun Award. During his career, he authored a technical manual titled Maya Feature Creature Creations published by Charles River Media. Todd has extensive freelance experience, which includes dozens of military and game style simulations, corporate commercials, and theme park rides, including bug crawling effects

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (July 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584502258
• ISBN-13: 978-1584502258
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,268,265 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Todd Palamar began his career creating traditional special effects for low budget horror movies. Self-taught and passionate about stop motion animation, he quickly gravitated to computer animation. After working on numerous straight-to-video movies, he switched gears and entered the video game industry. You can visit Todd Palamar's website at www.speffects.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hmmm..., January 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Maya Featuring Creature Creations (Graphics Series) (Paperback)

I was very excited when I first saw that book on amazon.com.
But that excitement turned into a dissapointment FOR ME as soon as I read through the chapters.

The reason was that the concepts this book intoduces to the reader are way too difficult to achieve. The proccess of making a physically correct rig that interacts with skin is nothing to dive into with the standart toolset of Maya. Its possible. But overkill. Both for the user and your machine.

A wasted part of that book in my opinion was the clay modelling chapter. If a cg artist wants to learn something about the essentials of modelling with clay, he should buy a book dedicated to this theme, and this topic should have been out of the scope of this book. (Where talking about 50-60 pages here)

The CD is not very intuitive. You have to dig in the folders and find the example scenes. After doing that pray for a reasonable playback rate of a fully rigged plain arm. I never saw my machine struggeling that hard for each frame.

I still give 3 stars for this book because its just that it didn't live up to my expectations. Its a good book though for those who want to exactly achieve that kind of forensic effects. I expected an dedicated rigging book, also having an indepth look on smooth skin - ifluence and blendshapes and wrap deformers and so on. Anyway.

If you really are as obsessive as Todd Palamar and want to dive in an totally different approach in doing your rigs, good luck with this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than skindeep into maya, June 13, 2004

By 

"unlikelycorny" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maya Featuring Creature Creations (Graphics Series) (Paperback)

Maya Feature Creature Creations consists of two parts. The first part deals with the creation of a clay model, the second part with the digital translation of the clay model and the possibilities of rigging and skinning the digital creature.

The weak spot of the book is bit between the two parts, that where the clay model is scanned and digitally translated. Not many readers will have the hardware to properly scan a clay model. This makes the first part of the book somewhat useless. Interesting for someone who wants to know the process of creature creation in films but not usable for personal training.

The strength of the book therefore lies, in my opinion, in the latter halve of the book. Todd Palamar there dives deeply into several modelling and rigging methods. Other than the standard Maya book he views more savvy ways of production and the Maya user with experience can learn a lot from it. In the last part of the book Todd looks at skinning methods using softbodies with underlying muscles and tendons. Extremely interesting, but since even the larger studios are battling with the difficulties of dynamics driven skin, it is not surprising that the methods explained do not lead to smooth results. The troubleshooting section in the end trying to solve problems in this field could have been a chapter in itself since many problems come with dynamic skinning. It's typical that Todd is not able to show a properly muscle skinned animation of his creature at the end of the book, but is able to show some pics of where the skin went horribly wrong.

So why 4 stars? Because the book is an excellent training tool, a well written manual deep into Maya and only one of the few books able to touch upon the area's of dynamics driven skin or mel driven rigs. Also the wide scale of methods explained is great for those who are not looking for quick solutions and crappy rigs. Combine it with the Jason Schleifer dvd lectures and `Maya Character Creation: Modeling and Animation Controls' from Chris Maraffi for the full picture and learn to create your own methods for advanced rigs and skinning methods.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars excellent investment, September 13, 2002

By 

Tik Tak Toe "maxschoenherr" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maya Featuring Creature Creations (Graphics Series) (Paperback)

this is a well written book on maya for advanced readers/users. in-depth chapters about modeling and texturing a fictional animal. how do we texture polygons, subDs and nurbs? alias|wavefront's docs answer no questions here. todd does.

another fine chapter: animating the character's skin by the motion of bones and muscles. rigid and soft body dynamics and a few driven keys.

sadly, the publisher printed this book in black & white which makes some screenshots unusable.

a large portion of the book deals with clay modeling. why not?