Review: 101 Autodesk Maya Tips by Dave Girard

This was a short book, so I’ll give it a short review. Basically, 101 Autodesk Maya Tips is exactly what it sounds like: a compilation of quick tips for using Autodesk Maya. Some of the tips are as brief as one sentence, but a few are more involved. It seemed like the majority of the content was based around Mel scripting, and various ways to automate particular tasks. I have not worked with Mel scripting much, and am still trying to wrap my head around the interface and UI of Maya. Girard does, thankfully, include some more basic tips as well.

With a book like this, I was not expecting any grand revelations. The goal appears to be just to highlight some shortcuts and methods for getting more out of Maya. Certainly, I can’t complain about the price (at $3) and I finished the book in probably about an hour. All in all, I guess only really a handful of the tips were immediately useful to me, though it was great to see what’s possible. For that, I found it worth the meager cost and time investment. Hopefully you will find some value too in this quick read.