Maya 4.5 Fundamentals

After building your scene and animating it, your final steps are usually adding a camera and rendering the animation. A camera is more than just a viewpoint, however. The camera is another part of your project's creative vision, just as movie cinematographers help tell a story by where they place and focus the camera. By working with settings such as zoom and focal length, you can make a mouse seem as big as an elephant or a skyscraper look tiny. Unlike a real camera, Maya's virtual camera has no mass or size, so it can pass through pinholes or change direction instantly. Where you position the camera and how you frame your subject matter are important details in composing your animation and adding depth to your art.

In animation, rendering is the process of generating a series of two-dimensional images from a view of a three-dimensional scene. The images are saved as image files (frames) that can later be placed in sequence to produce an animation. You can also render still frames to sample what the final animated sequence will look like at different points. You have rendered some images in previous tutorials, but in this chapter, you'll delve into some of the more advanced options for rendering.

Another area you'll begin to look into is alternative renderers. Some of these renderers can produce much higher-quality images than the default renderer. Mental Ray is now included in Maya 5, one of the industry's top rendering engines. The Mental Ray renderer is a fairly advanced rendering solution, so this chapter's tutorial just gives you an overview of its rendering options. You'll also see how an alternative renderer can enhance the quality of your work. In addition, this chapter covers the following topics:

  • Cameras and views Learn what the three camera types are in Maya and how they work. You'll also find out how the views you're familiar with, such as Side and Perspective, differ in terms of camera setup.

  • Camera settings Discover what attributes are available for customization so that you can fine-tune your camera setup and placement.

  • Animating cameras Learn how to work through the process of animating a camera.

  • Playblast You see how the Playblast works and learn how it can help you refine your animation and save you hours of wasted render time.

  • Render Global Settings You use the Render Global Settings window to define values for the Maya rendering engine. You'll get a chance to work with the most commonly used settings and understand what they do.

  • Adding a camera for your lobby You'll have the opportunity to add a camera to the scene you have been building and render an animated fly-through of your scene.

  • Mental Ray setup for HDRI This introduction to the Mental Ray renderer explains how to turn on Mental Ray shaders and work with High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI).

Key Terms

antialiasing A rendering option that helps eliminate the "jaggies" often found between object edges and produces a smoother version of an image.

Perspective view The default camera view into your 3D scene that allows you to pan, zoom, and dolly throughout your scene and incorporates many of the settings you find on a traditional film camera.

orthographic view A 2D "flat" view of the scene, usually visualized from the front, side, or top. Orthographic views eliminate all foreshortening.

focal length The Maya term for the perspective exaggeration or "wide-angle" quality of a camera. In real cameras, it's the distance from the lens to the film plane, directly proportional to the object's size in the frame.

clip planes Represent the camera's viewable range in z-depth; in Maya, cameras can see objects only within the values that have been specified for the clip planes.

depth of field The camera's range of distance within which objects are sharply focused; also called the distance blur effect (commonly seen in photography with a subject that's in the near foreground). Objects outside the camera's depth of field (either closer to or farther away from the camera) look blurred or out of focus.

tumble Rotate the camera about its center.

track Translate the camera up, down, left, or right without changing its aiming rotation.

dolly Move the camera toward or away from its center of interest; the scene then appears larger or smaller.

zoom Camera's focal length is changed but its position in space does not move.

roll Rotating the camera around its sight line (the line connecting the camera to its center of interest).

scrub To drag time forward and backward so you can check animation in a view. This is done by LMB-dragging in the Time Slider.

Playblast A hardware renderer feature of Maya that uses screen captures of a selected scene window to create a movie file. This movie file allows you to see a quick-shaded or wireframe playback of your animated scene in real time.

batch render A background process that allows you to render a sequence of frames rather than a single still image while continuing to work in Maya (recommended only if you have a multiprocessor machine); these frames are stored in the Images directory for your project.

renderer The engine that calculates the surface of a model; environmental effects such as water, fog, clouds, glows, smoke, and particles; and the light and material interactions in a scene, resulting in the final 2D image.

Mental Ray A third-party renderer that supports advanced rendering techniques, such as radiosity, HDRI, photon collection, and object-based lighting, and is accessible from the main Maya interface.

High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) An advanced lighting technique that uses multichannel information in the image format to act as a light source within your 3D scene.

Hotkeys to Memorize

s Set an animation key.

Shift+W Set a key for Translate mode.

Shift+R Set a key for Rotate mode.

Shift+S Set a key for Scale mode.

Alt+r Render Global Settings window.

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