Maya 4 Fundamentals book published - Medical, Technical, Marketing and AR Animation

Trinity Animation Founder Authors Maya 4 Book

Trinity Animation’s president Jim Lammers co-authored this beginner’s book on Alias|Wavefront’s Maya version 4 with Lee Gooding in 2002.

Lammers noticed that with the new, free, learning edition from Alias|Wavefront (called PLE for Personal Learning Edition) there would be a lot of interest in using Maya 3D software with little helpful documentation on how to get started. Lammers partnered with Gooding on creating the book content, splitting the work into writing for Lammers and tutorial design for Gooding.

One major innovation with this book was recording every single tutorial as a screen captured movie for the reader to view and follow. Naturally this made it much faster to learn for a beginner. Special codecs were employed to encode 13+ hours of full screen movies onto a single 650 MB CD-ROM, along with all the scene files. The book sold very well, with over 16,000 copies in the English version alone. The book was translated into 6 other languages as well.

From Library Journal

This beginning to intermediate guide covers 3-D animation fundamentals then moves on to step-by-step tutorials introducing Maya’s basic techniques. A tear-out hotkey page is useful for home users but irksome for libraries. The CD-ROM includes project files and video guides to each tutorial. While not as smooth or thorough as the videos in the “Virtual Classroom” series, these guides are helpful in illustrating techniques and providing information not available in the book. For large public libraries and academic libraries serving graphic design departments.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

Jim Lammers and Lee Gooding have done it! They’ve created a book that makes Maya easy to grasp for those new to Maya or to 3D. This book will help readers learn how to use Maya Complete and the new Maya Personal Learning Edition.Jim and Lee worked hard to devise an interesting project that would allow them to expose readers to the key functionalities of Maya 4. They created a series of “Spooky World” tutorials we hope you find valuable. In their efforts to provide readers with a truly valuable learning experience, Jim and Lee also put together over 13 HOURS OF TUTORIAL MOVIES, which are provided on the book’s CD. Every step of every tutorial is illustrated through CAMTASIA movies to help get you up to speed quickly. If you are looking for a book to give you a solid foundation for working with Maya 4, Maya 4 Fundamentals is definitely the place to start!

– Linda Bump Senior Acquisitions Editor

Product Details
Series: Fundamentals (New Riders)
Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: New Riders Press (February 18, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0735711895
ISBN-13: 978-0735711891
Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 1.3 x 9.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds

Reviews on Amazon were generally positive:

I purchased the first three books published for Maya 4 (this one, “Maya” by Danny Riddell/Andrew S. Britt, and “Exploring Maya 4: 30 Studies in 3D” by Maximilian Schoenherr), and this one is definitely the most useful, especially if you’re a newbie or intermediate. Just the accompanying CD alone is worth the money! It comes with video tutorials not unlike the popular Gnomon series that visually demonstrates the main points of the book, helpful info for Max users trying to migrate over to Maya, and includes an improved and extremely useful hotkey/marking menu system that I’m permanently going to use. In 2 days I consider myself much more proficient than I was, and the Maya workflow seems to make more sense now. Cheers to Jim Lammers and Lee Gooding for writing a superior manual on this complicated program!
If you get only one Maya book, make it this one.

– Michael Brennan

Trinity Animation Founder Authors Maya 4 Book

From Library Journal

From the Publisher

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