I'm looking for some helpful tutorials on creating objects in Maya. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I am interested in learning about skeletons, UV mapping and some of the inner functions of Maya.

I have noticed that their has been plenty of stunning work done on the forum and am interested how you learned how to do what you do. If their are any videos, PDF's or online tutorials that you know of I would be greatful if you could point them out to me.


I am attempting to create a simple walk-around game for concept. At the moment the game is planned to be based in an arena. This arena will have a few random buildings in it and be mostly static objects. A simple sand floor with a few rocks placed around it. Sort of like this:

I also want to create a simple bi-ped rig that I animate as the character with a jump, double-jump, run, walk, idle, straff etc. animations. The problem is that I have done very little modeling and what I have done has had huge excess of polygons. Additionally I have had trouble with UV mapping.

Are their any good tutorials for getting started with this kind of stuff?

I learned all I know with Lynda.com video tutorials, they are cheap and very useful, with example files.

Thanks for that site. Unfortunatly I am a poor college student :( .
I have done some searching on Youtube and found some nice videos about UV unwrapping but I have been unable to learn some of the other things.

For Example:
1. Sticking a Pipe through an object and cutting the object to allow you to see through the pipe.
2. Connecting a large number of edges or vertices. Say you cut a sphere in half and want to reconnect the vertices on the bottom of the sphere back together to form half a sphere. How do you do that?

Is their a better site to ask these questions on? Perhaps TurboSquid?

1- If i understood well, booleans can do that.
2- Go to Mesh edit > Merge vertex tool, that should work, but it works only on polygons.

I'd recommend you try Wings3D, it's really intuitive and you'd easily be able to do those two tasks very quickly.