Customer Reviews

Maya Featuring Creature Creations (Graphics Series)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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?

Hi This was one of the few books that was available as indian edition and I must say what a dissapointment.
The authors teaching style is clear but he loses focus and tries to teach clay modeling with scissors,steel clips,cutting plier ..what a shocker. There are other resources like kenny coopers videos that is way way better than this one.

I found this book very useful on learning character setup. It gives a more advance concept through different difficulty of examples depending on how comfortable are you with the chapters. The whole book contain a lot of very useful information and with quite a few industry experience reminder. While you are going through the book with your software, It kind of feels like an very experience industry expert sits in your book telling you all sorts of different valuable knowledge in making 3D creatures & related. As there are a lot of Maya tutorial that's on the market which a lot of them is like reading the software's help file which is totally nonsense. This book is one of the nicer one that I will always recommend this book to anyone that like creature set up & relate.

Simple Test: Click on the front cover image to enlarge it. Look at the "creature" there looking back at you. Look deep into its eyes, and then at its claws, face, skin, legs... the menacing figurine of destruction. Now think of Godzilla (example). Or a rampaging T-Rex, ILM style. What do you think the rest of 'Maya Feature Creature Creations' is going to be like with a clown-creature on its cover?