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INTRODUCING AUTODESK? MAYA? 2013 . 9th Edition. Dariush Derakhshani. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons. 2012. $49.99. 626 pp. softcover.

?Art is a marriage of inspiration, hard work, and practice.? -- Dariush Derakhshani

So much in mass media involves immerse 3D: still images in publications and print ads; dynamic animated visualizations in film and video games. (In virtual worlds, the 3D involves a much lower resolution and amount of detail.) While such work has won a broad audience, 3D is also used in a variety of professional fields such as architecture, interior design, engineering, and other fields.

Dariush Derakhshani has come out with the 9th edition of ?Introducing Autodesk? Maya? 2013,? the official training guide for Maya?, which enables still and animation modeling of 3D. The author has worked in ?computer graphics imagery? (CGI) for over 17 years and worked on feature films, music videos, and commercials as a 3D animator and special effects guru.

The author begins with a solid piece of advice. Take it slow. Those who are intrigued by 3D?s hyper-sensory presentation may let their ambitions get ahead of their learning, if they?re just coming to the field. Complex learning is often incremental. To learn well, readers would do well to pace themselves to actually acquire the understandings and skills to actually be able to exploit the tool.

One of the great affordances of a text is that one can self-pace. The book itself uses a developmental approach to take readers through the tool and all its functionalities. Further, those transitioning from other 3D modeling or animation tools will find a fairly smooth approach to learning Maya. Derakhshani?s work is inclusive of the needs of both novices and amateurs, and experts transitioning to the software because of its methodical introduction of the tool?with insightful details about functions and methods, built around short development projects. (Apparently, in the real world, after the training, many models used are pre-builts, in order to cut some of the development time. That would be understandable given how much methodical work goes into very brief effects.)

Setting the Context

Early on, there is a roadmap of the user interface, the layout of the main work screen, and the various design tools. To contextualize the tool, this text defines basic terminology and workflow. Preproduction involves thorough research, the writing of the script (a blueprint of the action), the storyboard (sequence of the script in time and visuals), conceptual art for styling, and production planning. There?s production (the actual development: creating the objects and settings, animating them, lighting the scene, and others), and then post-production (rendering, compositing, editing, and sound integration). This work combines art, storytelling, and technological savvy.

Throughout are helpful visuals to illustrate the points. Also, the author brings in from-life observations about projects?such as that time is always in short supply. This makes workflow efficiencies all the more critical, involving proper planning; efficient design, development, drawing and animation; smart rendering to save files in the event of system or software crashes (apparently, it?s smart to render as TIFFs).

Behind the actual work, there is a body of knowledge that practitioners use. There?s color theory and color mixing. There?s modeling on the x, y and z axes. There are some basics of composition and the uses of space. There?s the importance of contrast. There are strategies for creating believable illusory movement (animation as change over time as expressed through frames, keyframes, and in-between frames) with particular illusions of heft and mass; secondary effects from a movement; the follow-through of a motion. There?s lighting strategies, with a half-dozen different lighting models for different simulated circumstances. From videography, there?s the language of using various shots and points of view. Sound itself has a complex cultural tradition of communicating various types of information and mood.

One assumes the author had a strong sense of discipline to keep this text on track and focused given how many directions that it could have spun off in. He offers links to other resources and references to books that may be helpful. Then it?s off to the classic solar system exercise (sizes, movements, and some mapping to the universe), which is like the ?Hello, World!? one for programmers. (He offers creative suggestions, such as using cubes instead of spheres to see the rotations.)

Solid Workflow and Practical Work Habits

Throughout there are solid pieces of advice about how to organize the work, use proper labeling and clean practices (for work efficiencies and easier handoff), and adherence to design standards. There are multidimensional concerns?technological, artistic, workplace, and design?among others, and the author manages to evoke these concerns smoothly. He offers tips to ensure that the scene loads properly and that files save to the proper locations. He suggests incrementally saving files (including with Maya?s Incremental Save feature). Further, as with good design practice, he advises saving multiple copies of the work.

For example, he advises: ?Naming your objects right after creation is a good habit to develop. Doing so makes for a cleaner scene file and a more organized workspace. This is particularly important if anyone needs to alter your scene file; proper naming will keep them from getting frustrated when they work on your scene.?

Fine-Grained Work

Then, it?s on to the actual meticulous work. Those who work in engineering and design are probably aware of how the human mind tends to generalize. It may be hard to conceptualize the amount of work that has to go into 3D design. There are issues of scale and sizing, the relationships between various objects, the illusion of mass and physics, the proper setting of keyframe speeds for the simulated motion, and the proper lighting for illusory fidelity to the world. There?s the hierarchical definition of a scene and its respective elements. There are ways to play back an animation at designed speed in mid-design (?playblasting?) to see what has been programmed so far.

Needless to say, this requires deepened observations of the world and how it functions. Then, there is the need to intelligently acquire the software design tools and sensibilities to animate.

Readers see how shapes are built using wireframes and then covered over with textures or other surfacing. He demonstrates how parts of a figure may be extruded. He shows how designs may be overlaid on defined surfaces. This work carries learners through polygonal modeling based on ?primitives? or base geometrical shapes (involving plenty of spatial thinking) and a project to design and shape a human hand. This section introduces using the poly mesh for more nuanced size and proportioning.

Another assignment involves creating a virtual 3D catapult, which takes learners through various tools: extrusions and bevels, mirror geometry, Boolean operations (the ability to unionize, subtracting, and intersecting forms), pivot placement, edge looping, and others. The animation of this ?machine? involves particular movements of particular parts to create the illusion of an actual machine.

There are organic shapes that may be created using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) that enable the uses of patches for more detailed denser surfaces and the appearance of bendability. For this assignment, learners create a locomotive with connected and interactive parts.

He shows how to use photos to model an object in 3D with fairly close approximation of size relationships. He shows, too, how various paths may be used to access particular functions and to create certain effects.

A complex project involves the lamp with the attached 3D airplane seen on the book?s cover. Here, learners not only go through the paces of creating this 3D image, but they also learn how to create a detailed image within an image (through a referenced image). They learn how to rough out the size of the reference plane in Photoshop in order to size their object. There is also a red wagon that is modeled.

Motion

Motion is taught through bouncing balls, moving machine parts, and walking deformable shapes (like 3D people).

The text goes on to describe designing motion for mass and velocity to creating nuanced effects. (The author observes: ?What separates good animation from bad animation is the feeling of weight that the audience infers from the animation. People instinctively understand how nature works in motion.?)

Another section touches on human movement (?The Block Man?) and the simulation of walking. With learning any tool, it makes sense to go through all the tough work of manually creating the illusions to know what is going on on the back end when a CG character moves. (Once these are designed satisfactorily, they may be versioned by others for different characters and contexts. Further, created motion trajectories / path animations may be applied to different objects.)

There is full color Beginners? Gallery of created works that are dazzling, especially given the prior information about the meticulous work necessary to create such images. There is a chapter on the nuances of lighting and shading.

There are example and support files available.

Exacting Design and Development

It is not hard to imagine tens to hundreds of thousands of painstaking human hours invested into the creation of CGI for a movie or video game.

Maya? runs on Windows (2000, XP, and Vista), Linux, and Mac OS X. According to the front notes in the book, Derakhshani works as a supervisor for Zoic Studios based in Culver City, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The author writes in a highly readable style. He defines terms with clarity, even those which have multiple meanings from various disciplines (given the interdisciplinary nature of 3D animation design). Those who have a cerebral approach will find ?Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013? quite satisfying because the text offers some deeper explanations about what is happening behind the functions.

In instructional design, we rarely if ever have access to such complex skill sets as high-fidelity 3D animation (except in virtual worlds). Still, it is helpful to know some of the finer points of what it takes to create high-end 3D animations. There are free 3D design tools currently. As software simplifies (to a degree), this may be a tool that may have a space in the ID skill set. So, too, given how many consumers of media are used to high-quality visualizations, it can be terrifically difficult to create convincing 3D animations without a strong skill set and state-of-the-art technologies.

Illusion may be the first of all pleasures, to quote Voltaire, but it?s very difficult to create credibly in digital form.

Source: http://id.ome.ksu.edu/blog/2012/nov/13/review-3d-illustration-and-animation-maya/

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