Maya 3D: Zero to Hero

About This Book

Most of those here interested in 3d modelling probabily already know the featured book Blender 3d: Noob to Pro, it's a wonderful piece of work that helped me learn a lot, so I wanted to pass the love around by making an effort towards making a structured way to learn one of the big beast in the 3d panorama: Maya 3d. To do so I intend, whenever possible, to go over the point made by Blender: Noob to Pro and translating them into Maya, it may not be the best approach for a standalone book but as long as I'm going to write this alone it's my best bet to complete this project in the speediest manner possible, but I sincerely hope that others will come to help me in this frankly enormous endeavour. Without further ado let's begin.

Useful resources

Autodesk: this is the website of the company producing Maya, you may download a 3 year educational license for Maya (or any other program made by Autodesk) simply by signing in, the only limitation in the educational software is an annoying banner when you save, a more than fair bargain if you ask me. Autodesk learning pages: quite a bit of help for both beginners and the not so beginners.

Table of Contents

Unit 1: Background

• What Maya Can Do  ⇐ START HERE

• Section 1A: 3D Concepts (It will send you to the section in Blender 3d: Noob to Pro)
  • 3D Geometry
  • Coordinate Transformations
    • Orthographic Views
    • Perspective Views
  • Coordinate Spaces in Blender

• Section 1B: User Interface (UI)
  • User Interface
  • Base Command Overview
  • Tutorial:Excalibur