Maya Studio Projects Photorealistic Characters

This is one of many books I have purchased, and as always this book was in mint condition. The price was really good.The postage even though quoted, was delivered within 7 days, more than half the time of what I expected.I am very happy and will continue to put Amazon first when I am looking for books.

It is a little over my head at this juncture. I will go back when I believe I am advanced enough.

This is supposed to be (according to the title) a book about creating photorealistic characters in Maya. Right of the bat I would like to point out that it doesn't cover photorealistic eyeballs at all. You will not find them anywhere in the book. There are some nice color pictures of skin maps in the middle of the book and dedicates a few pages at the end of the book on how to use them. There is some good information about anatomy and clothing and how they are affected by the movement of the model. But the words "creating photorealistic characters" gives one the impression that actual modeling would be covered. It is not. The very first chapter of the book talks about motion capture for 2 and half pages and then just kinda glosses over rigging and skips right to paint weights. There is honestly less than one page of text and less than a page of images for rigging!I cannot with good conscience resell this book, but I don't want it. I might sell it to a used book store so that whoever considers buying it can look at the whole thing beforehand. CD is still in tact. Wasn't worth opening.

I understand that the author could only use a mock up model to test out the contents of this book, but it's still a bit lackluster. The book is very hard to read, and would have been much more suitable as an online list of steps on how to make it work.

Must have if you want to learn about 3D

Teach a person how to fish, and he/she will be able to fix their dinner without ever having to pester you again. Keep going out to do it for them, and they will never know how. Too much information I will never use. The book, is, however, well written, obviously, some care was taken in the editing. The author seems to have a stake in the fact that this book should be understandable. I do feel the author cares, but maybe too much, and winds up doing things you can do yourself, if he would only show you how to get your own fish.

It exceeded my expectations, great quality, I received before the scheduled

I like the Studio Projects series. I got this book looking for detailed walkthrough of the Photorealistic skin creation process.This book has about 35 pages about setting up a Motion Capture Studio and zero pages about the shader except a couple of figures of some of the texture maps. He doesn't even tell you which shader he's using except on very last page to mention by the way that the misss_fast_skin_Maya1SG needs to be set explicitly to use indirect lighting.The book is about setting up a face rig using muscles and nCloth skin, acquiring and applying moCap data, Hair, and nCloth clothing, but not about creating photorealistic skin.

I have Maya 2013 and many of the processes described in this book have been adjusted since Maya 2012 was released. As Autodesk has now released Maya 2015 this book is fast becoming redundant. However, if you use Maya 2012, then it is a useful introduction to facial hair, muscles and cloth. I can't imagine that I'm alone in thinking that the model used for exercises isn't very convincing, but it's really up to the individual artist to understand the processes and improve on the finished result.