The Game Artist's Guide to Maya: Getting Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP Working Together

I think is an awesome book, it has taught me a lot about polygons in a game character for design purposes, over all great find and loved it! This book has helped me with my game design class in College. Creating games, and having fun now! Thanks Loved It!

this book is really helpful to those advanced or noobs in maya(im the noob) and the instructions are very detailed, 10/10!!!

Michael really did a great job in showing, in detail the game art production pipeline. I loved the way he went thoroughly through the creation of the character from image planes, all the way to final detailing. Another nice feature of the book was interviews from real people in the industry. They gave you valuable advice in how to get into the industry, and how to develope your skills to get there. All in all, this is the best book I have read for Maya.

This book gives you all the primary skills and insights you need to make polygon characters from scratch to finish in Maya. It's simply brilliant! It's well written and its really one big easy-to-follow tutorial. It shows you the main modelling tools, detailed texturing, advanced rigging and animation and more. If you going to buy just one book on character animation in Maya, this is it.

First of all, this is a great book. I read it cover-to-cover twice within the first 24 hours. Now don't get the title wrong, 3D modelling will never be easy, and no book can ever make it so. What a book can do, and this book does very well, is to get you started. After the first chapter, which is a very interesting and useful tour around the "what's" and "how's" of the games industry, the book goes on to describe every step in the creation of a game character, from the initial concepts are made to the textured, animated model is finished and ready for the game. The book is built around a tutorial for a fantasy creature, but with comments on each step in general included where this is different from the character the book deals with. Being a novice modeller myself, I had several "so THAT'S how they do that" experiences while reading through the book, but I'm sure even experienced modellers would learn something. The first chapter on how to get a job in the games industry and what to expect once you have it is worth the price by itself. A basic knowledge of Maya is required to get the full benefit of this book, but using the built-in videos of the free "personal learning" edition included with the book as well as free tutorials from sites mentioned in the book will give you these skills in no time. As I said at the beginning, no book can ever make this area easy, but difficult to master does not mean it can't be relatively easy to get started, and if you (like me) have a dream to one day become a modeller, I can't recommend this book enough. Now go buy it!