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Introduction to Maya 2015

by Justin Marshall, Delano Athias and Kyle Green

This in-depth Maya 2015 tutorial is designed to help you get a solid understanding of the core features found in Maya and help you to ease your transition into this very powerful program. Software required: Maya 2015, Photoshop. EM>Note: This course is free for the duration of A href="http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?839-Final-Contest-on-the-DT-Forums!">October's training contest in the forums/A>./EM>

What you'll learn

This in-depth Maya 2015 tutorial is designed to help you get a solid understanding of the core features found in Maya and help you to ease your transition into this very powerful program. During the course of these lessons, you'll have a chance to learn about different aspects of Maya from several of our instructors here at Digital-Tutors. Digital-Tutors is the world's largest resource for Autodesk training, and over the years, we've had the honor and the privilege of teaching some of the top artists and studios all around the world. And for the next several hours, we'll be giving you the most structured, well-rounded and easiest-to-follow Maya training that you'll be able to find anywhere. In the first portion of this tutorial, we'll be getting you familiar with some of the vocabulary and foundational skills that you'll need in order to begin moving around and working in Maya. From there, we'll move into exploring some of the modeling features found in Maya, and we'll begin building the mech that will be our central project for the remainder of this course. We'll take you through the entire process of adding textures and materials to the mech, adding animated movement and animation controls, adding dynamics, and finally, we'll learn how to add lights, shadows and output our final animated sequence. This training is designed for new Maya users, so our goal is not to weigh you down with a lot of technical information. Instead, we want you to form some really good habits and workflows, allowing you to see the entire start-to-finish pipeline for this project, and by the end of this tutorial, we want you to be at a point where you can feel very comfortable using Maya. Software required: Maya 2015, Photoshop. EM>Note: This course is free for the duration of A href="http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?839-Final-Contest-on-the-DT-Forums!">October's training contest in the forums/A>./EM>

Table of contents

Introduction and Project Overview
1min

About the authors

Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials, and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist. As an author, Justin enjoys collaborating with fellow authors, especially on project... more

Delano works avidly as an animation author at Pluralsight. Starting his career at animation studios like Shilo, Delano has developed a strong passion for his talents. His animation and rigging background help him teach and create some of the most-watched training on Pluralsight. A few of his favorite projects that he has contributed to include: Character Interaction in Maya and in Softimage, Rigging the Human Face in Maya, Rigging Sea Creatures in Maya, and Rigging and Animating Transforming... more

Kyle was one of the first authors for Digital-Tutors, now a Pluralsight company. and has been a part of the team for over 10 years. Kyle began his career in computer graphics education as a college instructor and worked as a Digital-Tutors rendering tutor and curriculum manager since 2002. Kyle has contributed to many of the most popular projects and helped the Digital-Tutors team win awards throughout the company's history. Kyle has had the honor of having his art exhibited at the New York ... more

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