Learning Maya 5: Rendering

There’s much more to rendering your final 3D image than hitting the "Render" button, especially in an application as deep as Maya. With options for everything from the color of shadows cast by lights to the size of the backplane on the virtual camera, tweaking the settings prior to final output can be daunting. In Learning Maya 5: Rendering, nearly everything that has to do with textures, shaders, lighting, camera attributes, output settings, compositing, and more is explored and explained.

The initial chapters cover materials, shaders, and textures--the attributes most responsible for the look of an object. The authors begin with an explanation of how Maya’s shading networks work, followed by discussions of the wide assortment of materials available, including multi-layered shaders (shaders composed of more than one material). Far from just a theoretical discussion, each page and chapter is filled with screenshots, definitions, and step-by-step tutorials designed to immediately expand your knowledge of how Maya works.

Placing a specific decal (like a logo) on a specific place of a model is perhaps the most difficult task modelers face, but after working through the tutorials in chapter 2 (some 45 pages worth) even this becomes easy. The authors go one step further by texturing a model with not just a single file, but a multilayered texture consisting of several files, as well as using texture files for displacement mapping on difficult-to-model objects (tire treads, in this case). Subsequent chapters discuss various types of lighting, camera attributes, shadow manipulation, compositing, and other important render output settings often overlooked by the untrained eye.

Part of the "Learning Maya" series from Sybex, the official publisher for Alias|Wavefront, Learning Maya 5: Rendering includes a CD containing all project and texture files, and a DVD that introduces some of the features new to Maya 5. This is a valuable series for any Maya artist. --Mike Caputo