Acknowledgments

We're proud to have been associated with the creative and excellent Maya Fundamentals team assembled by New Riders. We wish to thank them as a group and also individually: Development Editor Lisa Lord improved the book immeasurably with her inherent grasp of Maya from the first edition and into the present one. Along with Lisa's amazing attention to detail, we proudly bestow her the title of our official "Word Nerd." Acquisitions Editor Elise Walter piloted our project, keeping us on the right track and offering kind encouragement when we needed it. And this book would not be possible without the confidence from former Publisher David Dwyer. Associate Publisher Stephanie Wall also kept this edition on the front burner throughout its development. Thanks to the technical editors for this edition, Adrian Diamond, Chaz Laughlin, and Eric Pavey, for keeping things correct and accurate. Thanks also to Jay Payne for making the CD-ROM files fun to browse and bringing together all the digital content for this edition.

We'd also like to thank Kenny Cooper, Jeremy Foster, and Lee Gooding. Kenny designed the Chapter 4 tutorial, "Diving In," which teaches many concepts and yields some attractive results with a minimum of complex steps. Kenny, who works with Jim at Trinity Animation, also developed the human head modeling tutorial that makes up Chapters 6 and 7. Jeremy Foster is a freelance 3D artist, formally with Disney, who helped Garry organize and record nearly all the movie tutorials in this edition. Lee Gooding co-authored previous editions of this book, and the chimney smoke particle effects still remain in this edition.

Our cover model was Alia Lostaglia of Millenium Modeling Agency in Kansas City. Her agent, Janis Rovick, helped us with this somewhat unconventional photo shoot, during which we painted plus signs all over her face and took "mug shot" style photos for several hours. Thanks also to Bridget Kelly at Embassy Suites Hotels for providing a photography vantage point from the beautiful Westport Hotel near the Plaza in Kansas City.

The DVD has some extra goodies a commercial HDRI sky surround file from Dosch Design and a beautifully detailed 3D model of a Ford Mustang sports car from 3D02.com. Thanks to Sebastian Dosch of Dosch and Wesley Chow of 3D02 for letting us offer their commercial products as a bonus. Thanks also to Robert Lansdale of Okino, whose Polytrans 3D file conversion software was used for the Mustang and other import/export needs.

Thanks to the tutorial testers who helped refine the focus and clarity of this book's projects: Ben Riggin, Nathan Fariss, Dave Hutton, Steve High, David Hughes, Joel Jenkins, Scott Slauson, and Ryan Housknecht.

We're indebted to the artists who have contributed imagery to this book, in particular cover artist Alyssia G. Kim (see www.3dspacecadet.com for more of her images and movies) for giving us a book cover to promote Maya 5 Fundamentals before there were any words for the pages inside. The artists' inspirational images prove that lone artists can create stunning 3D art and animation using Maya, in an age where large teams of animators often work on single scenes for 3D animated movies.

Thanks to Alias for its help particularly David Lau and Leilei Sun for keeping my software humming between new beta releases.