Maya is 3D computer graphics software, used widely for a variety of special effects, ranging from video games to full-blown feature films. It is developed and marketed by Autodesk, and it has become one of the standard tools in the professional animation and graphics circles. Maya 2012 is, as of this writing, the latest iteration of this software package.

Maya is tremendously powerful software, and its user-interface dwarfs most other similar ones for the lower-level graphical applications. If you are new to Maya, your first encounter with it can be extremely intimidating. It takes a while to get the feel for your way around, but fortunately there are many good books and online resources that will help you with this.

“Cheating in Maya 2012” is a book of tips and tricks that can help you become a better animator with Maya 2012. It is not a book that will teach you how to use Maya, so you should find another resource for this basic information. However, if you have already mastered the use of Maya, then this book is an excellent resource for learning the fundamentals of 3D animation.

The book comes with an accompanying website, where you can find and download many of the files and examples that are used throughout. Some of the files used in the examples are actually named differently than the ones in the book. For the most part it is easy to figure out which file the authors had in mind, but being a bit more careful about this point would have helped.

The chapters and examples are arranged sequentially in terms of their complexity. Some of the material in the more advanced chapters depends on what was covered earlier, but for the most part you can jump around the book and learn those tricks that are particularly interesting to you. Each example covers one particular animation concept or trick. These are gone through in some detail, but I found that certain key steps were brushed over. This is certainly not a book for someone who is still new to Maya. It is written from a very animation-centric viewpoint, and most of the tricks and animation concepts that are introduced here can be applied in all sorts of animation environments.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone who has ever wanted to create complex 3D computer animation from scratch. To get the most out of it you should already be fairly familiar with Maya, but otherwise no prior animation knowledge is assumed.