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Introduction to Maya 2016

by Justin Marshall, Delano Athias and Eddie Russell

This in-depth Maya 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 2016.

What you'll learn

This in-depth Maya 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. We are 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 spacecraft that will be our central project for the remainder of this course. From there, we'll take you through the entire process of adding textures and materials to the spacecraft, 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 course 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 Maya tutorial, we want you to be at a point where you can feel very comfortable using the software. Software required: Maya 2016.

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

Eddie began teaching creative professionals over ten years ago for Digital Tutors. In 2014 Digital Tutors was acquired by Pluralsight and he continued his focus on creating high quality training for artists in both the film and games industries. With a background in graphic design and illustration Eddie has always been focused on visual appeal. This can be seen through his courses in which he shares secrets for achieving production level quality for concept art, illustrations, textures, mater... more

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