I can bet you sure as anything that there's already a resource about this, but I've looked and I can't find one (sure enough though instead of spending the minutes to read through threads I just made one myself). Anyway, I'm going to assume that the aspects to learning Maya if you're new might be briefly covered in the Maya documentation that comes with the program. However, I have not yet had the chance to read this documentation and I'm at college at the moment so I can't read it yet. I'm going to use this time to ask. Are there any guides that will explain the basics and a bit more to Maya? Not any tutorials to do fancy stuff because I can't understand anything that's in those. I'm also not an artist... I think I'll try to improve my drawing skills but I'm mostly just playing around with Maya to practice making visual effects and magic spells that you'd see around in RPGs. Perhaps in the future I'll build up enough skill to create character models. Anyway, can anyone help me? I'd appreciate it.

You kinda answered your own question. Maya's built in help feature is genuinely helpful. It is full of both descriptions of Maya's various functions plus tutorials on how to use the basics. Who would have thought that a couple thousand dollar piece of software would come with the documentation on how to use it? [wink]

Also, the Maya Fundamentals books are a great start as well as they get you into working on actual projects. I'd say hit them right after working through a number of Maya's built in tutorials.