Learning Maya

[Narcissa Larkham]

I'm trying to learn Maya but it seems everyone wants to closely guard their secrets unless I want to pay money.  Does anyone know free content on the web that teaches you the basics of sculpting, wrapping, etc?  A quick Google search doesn't find too much that a beginner working by themselves can understand easily.

[MIstahMoose]

WIth a program that costs so much, yes. They have their secrets locked up.

Try blender, much more free access to lessons and learning, Even in-world classes. Unless you actually paid for Maya, then yeah.. keep learning that. 

Check out forums like polycount/cghub to find places to learn maya. Polycount wiki si awesome. Youtube seems to pull up plenty on maya?

[Cathy Foil]

Yes!  YouTube is a wonderful place to find loads of tutorials even for beginner.  I like this guy he's great:

http://www.youtube.com/user/cannedmushrooms

He has some really great beginner video tutorials here:

http://vimeo.com/johnska7/videos/page:1/sort:date
They were made 5 or 6 years ago but the basics never really change.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Astrid Kaufmat]

Maya comes with quick start video then you can look at its online guide for each chapter you want to know

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/

also check the learning path

There are several books that you could use,not rearly any secret Da Vinci code. In many site now you can also have a quick peek before you buy to see if they're written properly.A good thing is also to choose among those books that have been translated in your main language , so the workflow and learning process would be faster. I could tell you mine in PM rather than making ads for this or that book for maya ( they are not free ). I suggest you to look for  those e-strores for book that offer you a quick glance of some chapters so you can realize if it's properly written to teach or not .

A good book together with practice and video that you can find in youtube, as cathy said, or on creativecrash for help plugins and some tutorial is a good start.

For sculpting maya tools are limited, you might want to consider mudbox  or even better zbrush (recomended if you're not using yet a nasa pc with a grid of ram sticks big enough to make a barbecue, cause it's way of sculpting is very very light also for complex models).This of course if for sculpting you mean the sculpting tools like in blender to make normal maps.

The sculptie scripts is instead quite easy to use in maya,once that you 've got its fundamentals.

I don't get from the message if you already know modeling basics or if you want to start from maya.In case you'd need a quick glance at first fundamentals of 3d here is a free book for blender that would make you quickly get a lot of concepts that then  you can share with any software you want.

My advice when you learn is not to follow by letters or by frame tutorials but trying to take it like you'd learn advanced math, say like a phylosphy trying to make of anything general concepts that you could use anywhere. After a few this would give you the ability to be flexible among softwares.

 

 

[Narcissa Larkham]

Thanks guys, I have Maya 2014 and I was using Blender at first but didn't really like the program and the UI.  I've purchased basic tutorials from the guy selling them on the SL market place but to be honest for that kind of money his videos have me stuck on uv wrapping.  I'll keep looking.

[Gamthalion Raymaker]

Hey Astrid.

UV Mapping in maya is not always eazy or fast for that matter.

To make fast good UV maps try to import the model to roadkill or zbrush to UV map it then import it back to maya.