Rating: 
Summary: not realy for mid to expi users, more for begginers
Review: ... so I use Maya from v1. And I hoped that this book will give me different aproach to solving some more complex situations. Modeling section is quite unnecesary (no tips and tricks there). All in all exelent book for beginers, but nothing more. Expierienced user, or one who like to dig into maya will find litle or no use of this book since one probabily came to all these solutions on it's own. Everybody else should buy this book. It might show you the way to go into maya real powers. Also I think the book is litle streched and some renderings are added just too fill space and make book thicker.On a second tought worst thing about this book is statment that is intended for mid. to exp. users. It's exelent book for beginers. If you are one buy the book! Now!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy this book!!!!!
Review: 2 stars only because it isn't absolutely completely worthless. Really, the lessons in this book are trivial, and won't help you get any better at using maya. The tricks he shows you are too specific to be of any real use. If you are expecting a tutorial that will teach you standard and advanced modeling lighting or rendering techniques, you have come to the wrong book. This book is almost worthless. If you read through it you may come out with a few useful tricks up your sleeve, but not many. Some of the tutorials are like- "How to model a suitcase" and (this is great) "How to construct a figure whose surface is rougher than the usual 3D characters" (a displacement tutorial). Where is the tutorial for "How to model a human head" or "Using NURBS" or "How to use FUR" or "Lighting Effects" or "Texture Mapping Explained"----NONE OF THESE ARE IN HERE SO FIND THEM ELSEWHERE!!!!!! In summation- DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS POORLY WRITTEN, USELESS book, too specific for an intermediate user, to vague for a beginner, and lacking everything that would make this a good book.
Rating: 
Summary: Refreshingly different Maya book for beginning stages
Review: A book full of colour shots. That should be the standard for graphics books enforced by law! Add to that Maximilian writes in a funky upbeat style. I love the idea behind this book. Nothing is more boring and frustrating than a 1000+ page tome that lists all the functions in alphabetical order, and leaves it up to you to make sense of them. Here you have 30 small tutorials that each show you a few of those effects, I am sure you are already rearing to make in Maya, if only you knew how. For a complete beginner in Maya, or 3D for that matter, this is going to be wonderland. For a slightly experienced Maya user, there is still so much to find. But the advanced Maya user might only find a few tutorial that will teach him or her new tricks.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book!
Review: After seeing some of the negative reviews posted, I felt compelled to add my own experience with the book. This is easily one of the best 3d Books of any kind I've ever purchased. Those unhappy with the book are missing the whole point. The author is not trying to present tutorials that are an end in themselves. Those are a dime a dozen on the web. Instead he focuses on theory and the hows and why's so one can take that knowlege and create on their own. I enjoyed this approach and I will be looking foward to the author's next work.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, sometimes hard to follow
Review: After using Exploring Maya 3, I picked up this new edition. I find it easy to follow, and with excellent examples. I believe a beginner in Maya would find this a great source for study, and have no problem grasping the ease of Maya within a few weeks.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Book!
Review: Buy it if you wanna learn good to pro tricks for Maya 4. Very clever design , read it in one weekend and took me 2 days to implement all examples from the scratch (not importing projects from Cd-rom , imho the best way of learning). The author spread his studies through 4 areas (animation , modelling ,dynamics and rendering). Rendering is by far the best one with really smart ideas for professional-look scenes. Animation area lacks "human maneuvers" maybe because today every animator is considering "human maneuvers" is for ULTRA-EXPENSIVE capture motion devices. Dynamics pretty good , but some of them are available in some websites. Modelling , well for me who works with Autocad/Shade/DesignCad since early versions (yes long time ago) this chapter didn't add so much but its really cool for people who is start to work with modelling now. Sorry english is not my main language. Jorge Faria
Rating:
Summary: Nice Book!
Review: Buy it if you wanna learn good to pro tricks for Maya 4. Very clever design , read it in one weekend and took me 2 days to implement all examples from the scratch (not importing projects from Cd-rom , imho the best way of learning). The author spread his studies through 4 areas (animation , modelling ,dynamics and rendering). Rendering is by far the best one with really smart ideas for professional-look scenes. Animation area lacks "human maneuvers" maybe because today every animator is considering "human maneuvers" is for ULTRA-EXPENSIVE capture motion devices. Dynamics pretty good , but some of them are available in some websites. Modelling , well for me who works with Autocad/Shade/DesignCad since early versions (yes long time ago) this chapter didn't add so much but its really cool for people who is start to work with modelling now. Sorry english is not my main language. Jorge Faria
Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource for the user of Maya PLE
Review: For those experimenting with Maya, this is a very helpful book to have. It is not entirely self contained and you should make use of Maya's documentation that works with the software.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent resource for the user of Maya PLE
Review: For those experimenting with Maya, this is a very helpful book to have. It is not entirely self contained and you should make use of Maya's documentation that works with the software.
Rating:
Summary: How this book came about (a letter from the author)
Review: Hello, I _had_ to rate this book to write this message here ;) I'm the author of this book. It's my first book in English-a translation of my second German book on Maya. The first book was written for newcomers and introduced not only the interface of Maya but also topics like the aesthetics of high-end 3D animation, the depth of logical nodes, and the basics of character animation and dynamics. It is very comprehensive and 600 pages strong. The new book has only 200 pages and was developed while I taught 3D animation using Maya 4 to students at the University of Aachen and the German Film Academy in Ludwigsburg who were all familiar with the basics of the software but not with much more. So, please don't expect from this book any instructions about how to use the Hotbox, create a Loft, or render a sequence of pictures for NTSC. My intention as an author and a teacher was to explore as much of the complexity of Maya 4 as possible using rather brief, practical, and extremely different tutorials called "studies". None of these studies took the students longer than an hour to complete, but most of the studies lured them even deeper into the matter, so that eventually much more complex modelings or animations were created. After finishing all 30 studies, the students had a good overview of what's possible in the software. I also found that they kept returning to the book during other projects of their own. The reason for this constant reference seems to be the fact that the book was not written from the angle of the tools but from questions coming from real life. So, when you animate a character that has to grab a pen, you might remember Study # 8, "Steering the Bike (With a Little Distraction)." When you have to quickly model a complete character, you might want to take a look at Study # 10, "Knobbly Man." When you have to animate an explosion, Study # 17, "Erupting Volcano" might help you. And if you want to mix animation phases, you might want to check the index which gives you several entries about nonlinear animation, clips, poses, and the Trax Editor. Of course, digital painting in 2D and 3D and the Paint Effects play an important role, too; just look at the studies "Wild Things" with hybrid plants, "The Shadow of the Trees," "Swim Ring with Love," or the animation of the Chinese character Ji in Study # 30. I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing and translating it!
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