The Paint Effects - famous for their photorealistic plants - also play an important role in this book. Using this tool we paint a swim ring with six hearts, make the shadow of a birch tree appear in our otherwise rather dull 3D-room and move a camera through a genetically engineered meadow. And the book touches a generally underestimated mode of the Paint Effects - namely to let you paint in 2D.

The sequence in which the chapters appear has nothing to do with difficulty levels or degrees of sophistication, only with change and variation. Just dive into the chapters that jump out at you as you browse. Obviously, 200 some odd pages of paper can¹t compete with the terabytes of information here on the Internet. On the other hand, you can¹t casually pick up the Internet and put it on your lap in the garden. Most information related to Maya on the Web isn¹t very well organized, though it¹s rich in mass and content. You¹ll find dozens of tutorials and hundreds of free MEL scripts and plug-ins under the hood of highend3D.com and aliaswavefront.com.