Keller - Maya visual effects: the innovators guide

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Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

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ISBN: 978-1-118-44160-2

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Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Maya Visual Effects: The Innovators Guide, Second Edition; Autodesk Official Press. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, were still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, were working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. Id be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how were doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at nedde@wiley.com. If you think youve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

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Neil Edde

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For all my students and all my teachers. Lets make something cool today!

Id like to thank all the people who worked so hard on this project, especially the editors, Mariann Barsolo, Amy Breguet, Eric Charbonneau, and Mark Dedecker. Id also like to thank Pete Gaughan. Huge thanks go to Max Dayan for writing some great MEL scripts, helping me solve some tricky problems, and providing me with a supercool spaceship model for many of the tutorials. Thanks also to Leonardo Krajden for his gun model and Mark Dedecker for his eyeball model.

Id like to thank the following artists, teachers, and authors for their inspiration over the years: Gael McGill, Alex Alavarez, Scott Spencer, Campbell Strong, Martin Hall, Saty Raghavachary, Dariush Derakhshani, John Brown, Drew Berry, and everyone at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects.

Naturally, all the programmers and designers at Autodesk who work so hard to develop this software deserve special recognition for their hard work. They are the true artists who allow the rest of us to create such fantastic things.

Extra special thanks go my wife, Zoe, for tolerating my nonstop talk of polygons, nParticles, and Paint Effects strokes, as well as my pals Daisy and Joe, who force me to go outside. And as always, special thanks to little Blue, whose hungry ghost still haunts the kitchen.

Eric Keller is a freelance visual effects artist working in Hollywood. He divides his time between the entertainment industry and scientific visualization. He teaches the Introduction to Maya and Introducing Digital Sculpting classes at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, and has authored numerous animation and visualization tutorials for the Harvard Medical School course Maya for Molecular Biologists, taught by Gael McGill.

Eric started out as an animator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland, where he created animations for science education for seven years. In 2005, he and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he could study and learn from the masters of visual effects. His goal is to bring the artistry and technology of Hollywood computer graphics to the field of scientific visualizations in the hope that it can inspire and inform the scientific community and the general public.