Creating Visual Effects in Maya: Fire, Water, Debris, and Destruction

Your one-stop guide to creating mind-blowing visual effects in Autodesk Maya. Full-color, step-by-step tutorials detail industry-staple visual effects techniques such as fur and hair growth, fire and water simulation, soft and hard body dynamics, cloth construction, and so much more. Maya guru Lee Lanier starts you off with the basics and then moves into more advanced tehcniques such as creature animation, patch modeling, effects scripting, render pass set-up, and others. The companion website features a treasure trove of project files, image sequences, texture bitmaps, and model FBXs, allowing you to immediately apply the techniques learned in the book.

Lee Lanier has worked in the motion picture industry since 1989, having spent hundreds of hours on live-action sets and thousands of hours working with high-end animation and compositing software. He’s created visual effects for Walt Disney Studios and served as a senior animator in the modeling and lighting departments at PDI/DreamWorks on Antz and Shrek. In addition to having taught at the Academy of Art University and Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Lee has written seven books on visual effects and digital compositing, has recorded tutorials for lynda.com and The Foundry, and is a member of the Visual Effects Society.