The Gnomon Workshop ships Introduction to Maya 2023

Originally posted on 30 April 2022. Now updated with details of Volume 3.

The Gnomon Workshop has released Introduction to Maya 2023, a new three-part series of beginner’s guides to Maya, recorded by industry veteran Eric Keller.

Volume 1 provids a comprehensive tour of the Maya interface, covering the different editors needed when building 3D models and scenes, and comprises just under three hours of video training.

Volume 2 covers modelling and animation, introducing the key tools required to build and animate models inside Maya, and comprises over four hours of video.

Volume 3 covers lighting, shading, rendering using the Arnold renderer, and how to prepare assets for use in a game engine like Unreal Engine.

Volumes 1 and 2 were originally titled Introduction to Maya 2022, but have now been updated for the most recent version of the software.

Volume 1: an introduction to Maya’s interface and node-based workflow
Maya is one of the key applications in the digital production market, used widely in game development and in visual effects and animation for movies, TV series and commercials.

Eric Keller’s latest series of tutorials covers everything you need to know to get started using Maya, beginning with the software’s interface, and an introduction to node-based workflows.

Keller walks through the creation of a Maya scene, revealing how the relationships between the nodes used to create it define the shapes of objects, their shading, animation and the lights and cameras in the scene.

Volume 2: discover Maya’s key 3D modelling and animation tools
Volume 2 introduces the key tools needed to create and animate 3D assets inside Maya, including the UV toolkit, Graph Editor, deformers, animation visualisation tools and animation layers.

A bonus chapter introduces the new tools introduced in Maya 2023 earlier this year.

Volume 3: master lighting, cameras and rendering in Maya
Volume 3 reveals how to export the finished animation from Maya – either by rendering it out, or by exporting the data to another application like Unreal Engine 5.

The workshop begins by explaining how to texture the models using Maya’s Hypershade interface, how to use the Standard Surface shader, and how to create and apply material presets.

Keller then moves on to discuss how to light the scene for rendering, how to set up rendering cameras, and how to batch render an image sequence using the Maya plug-in for the Arnold renderer.

The workshop concludes with an overview of how to use the Game Exporter interface to export models and animation clips from Maya into Unreal Engine 5.

Other topics covered include how to work with UDIMs, render layers, AOVs, file references and Alembic caches, and how to use MASH networks when setting up environments.

As well as the training videos, viewers can download project files for all three volumes of the tutorial.

About the artist
Eric Keller has been working as a CG artist since 1998. His credits include work on 10 Cloverfield Lane and Star Trek Beyond, and models for the title sequences of Aquaman and Swamp Thing.

As well as his other training videos for The Gnomon Workshop, he has also taught the Introduction to Maya and Introduction to Digital Sculpting courses at the Gnomon school itself.

Pricing and availability
Introduction to Maya 2023: Volumes 1, 2 and 3 are available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, providing access to over 300 tutorials. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $490/year. Free trials are available.

Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.

The Gnomon Workshop ships Introduction to Maya 2023

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