Re: Reccomendations for an Intro to Maya class

Let me explain a little more about the situation here. I'm a student in this curriculum (though it should be noted that I have returned to school with nearly 20 years experience in graphic design and digital media) and am attempting to help the department head and instructors make a better, smoother course, that will create confidence in the students as opposed to frustration. I should note that this is the third “introductory” course in Maya that I have taken and all have been very frustrating, leaving me with little confidence in working with the program.

What the intro course is trying to cover is all the basics - unfortunately there seem to be so many that the class is a whirlwind where little is either covered in depth or with enough time for it to sink it. Basically what you have listed is the curriculum, but one of the problems is organizing it into a logical flow - one that won’t leave the students overwhelmed by everything that is being thrown at them. There are more advanced courses in modeling and animation that will be offered in later semesters, but we're trying to develop a course that will give the students a solid basis for these later classes.

One of the biggest problems is finding a book with solid tutorials. The books that I have experienced, start off simple enough, but make far too huge of leaps for an introductory course. They so often seem to have the classic problem of drawing tutorials: step 1 – drawn and oval, step 2 – complete the drawing. It’s the lack of experience on our parts as students, and the lack of instruction in the tutorial that makes for a huge amount of frustration. Additionally, many of the tutorials are faulty, either because of typos, grammatical errors, or complete errors on the author’s part. Finally, I find the format of the books to generally be too small for the illustrations. Screen captures from Maya are wonderful however; they tend to be overly dark in print and far too small – particularly when you’re trying to decipher a detailed geometry (having been in the print industry most of my career I find this last bit very irritating – I know better than to do something like that).

Hopefully that explains the situation better. I’m looking for a more logical breakdown in the flow of teaching the basics of Maya and a better workbook/book of tutorials to go hand-in-hand with it. Pointing me to good tutorials online (web or video based) will also be a great help.

Thank you for your assistance!