Books for Animators

I hear all the time, from friends and colleagues, which are the best books for Animators?

The response tends to lean towards a response of "just google what you're looking for" - this is especially the prevalent answer, when asked for the best books to help understand Maya. Maya gets updated every year, so it makes sense to steer away from buying specific books to help with why-won't-keyframes-move-in-the-graph-editor questions.

There are LOADS of great books out there, that become like bibles for animators. Everything from Disney sketchbooks, to the ultimate Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams. So...I made a page especially for them. Take a peek and let me know what you think: Books and Gifts for Animators

Working With Wonderful Wacoms

It's been another busy week. My biggest achievement was to use a Wacom Tablet! To be honest, I was nervous about it, I've always used a mouse. Basically, Wacom tablet lets you use the Maya software (and any software really) using a pen stylus on a tablet. It completely replaces the mouse. It's weird, you just hover the pen over the tablet and it moves the cursor around your screen. It also has little buttons on your pen, to use the respective middle and right clicks. It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm really excited and have already done some Maya modelling with it! I got my Wacom tablet from Amazon, I'm using the Wacom Bamboo Pen Graphics Tablet from Amazon.co.uk and I'm really pleased with it (it only cost me about £50, bargain!). You can also get Wacom tablets on Amazon.com so it's definitely worth shopping around.

See link for image credit.

I also started modelling heads and modelling furniture this week! Quite a comparison, lol. The head picture on the left is from a design page at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne I'm linking because there are some pretty nifty tutorials on how to model in Maya, so definitely worth taking a peek.

I'm beginning to feel more and more confident about using Maya. It's taken a few weeks, but things are starting to sink in, and some techniques are turning into autopilot in my mind.

As far as travelling to my course goes, I've not had any commutable problems into London, with the Olympics in full swing...which is always a bonus!