Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting, 2nd Edition is a culmination of Lee Lanier's professional and teaching experience. He learned advanced techniques working on such films as Mortal Kombat and Shrek, and as an instructor he craved an in-depth book that taught shop-tested and professional texturing, lighting, and rendering methods.

This second edition is up-to-date with Maya's latest texturing, lighting and rendering powerhouse features, including Toon shading, nCloth texturing, and multipass rendering. It begins with an introduction of lighting concepts, moves into a thorough explanation of texture mapping and Maya's hidden features for achieving great results, then provides the most thorough exploration ever published of Maya's Hypershade (where animators create connections between shaders, texture maps, lights, cameras, and geometry), and concludes with a detailed look at rendering in Maya, including everything from batch rendering to global illumination workflow and HDRI techniques.