Warning: This is a Maya tutorial, so anyone who reads my blog for the animation, should probably skip this post.

A classmate asked me to show him how I light and render my scenes, so I thought I'd right a quick tutorial in case someone else might be interested as well. Here goes.

Below I will show you the steps neccessary to quickly light and render a simple scene with a box in an "infinite color" background. This technique only works if your scene doesn't have any walls. Indoor scenes require a more complicated lighting scheme and I haven't quite found a quick way to light those scenes.

Step 1:
Create a Maya scene with a polygon box on top of a backdrop. The backdrop is basically a plane with a curved back to it. You can create a smooth curved backdrop by applying a bend deformer to a plane and having the deformer only bend the back half of the plan. The front half is the flat surface that the box will rest on. The backdrop will help make it look like an infinitely empty space behind the object.

Rendering the scene as is with the default Maya Software Renderer will look something like this:

Step 2:
In the Render Global Settings under “Render Using” choose Mental Ray. If Mental Ray isn’t showing up in this box, you need to turn it on first. To do this go to Window --> Settings/Preference --> Plug-in Manager. The Plug-in Manager window will pop up. Scroll down until you see Mayatomr.mll. Make sure there are checks in the checkboxes for both “loaded” and “auto load” for this plugin by clicking in the corresponding boxes. Close this window. Now back to the Render Global Settings. Once you have changed the “Render Using” to Mental Ray, click on the “mental ray” tab below. Under “Quality Presets” choose “PreviewFinalGather”. Close the window.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

Step 3:

Change the Environment color of your camera to a lighter color. To do this, select your camera in the outliner (in this case I have a camera called RenderCam) and open up the attribute editor. Scroll down until you find “Environment” Change the Environment color by either pulling the slider to the right or clicking on the color and choosing a lighter color. The lighter this color is, the brighter the scene. Too light will blow everything out. In this case I just pulled the slider about halfway to the right.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

Step 4:

Add a directional light. Under Create  Lights choose Directional Light. Rotate the new light in the direction desired. In the attribute editor for the light, make sure to turn on Raytraced Shadows. You can also change the color and intensity here to for the desired effect.

The rendered scene will look something like this:

So this wraps up the tutorial. One thing to note is that you can get different color combinations by changing the backdrop texture color, camera environment color, or the directional light color. In some of my renders I liked using blue for the environment color (like the sky), and a light yellow for the directional light (like the sun). Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Please feel to correct me if I have made a mistake. If you have any crits or suggestions please leave a comment below. Thanks

Update:

As I have been using this technique for a while now, I have found that shadows can be too harsh. In order to soften them, you may need to increase the brightness of the environment color in the camera and reduce the intensity of the light. Play around with it until it looks right.

Also, I have found command line rendering to be much fast than rendering within Maya. To do this, make sure you have set the project to the appropriate folder within Maya. Command line rendering will put all the files within the last project folder set within Maya before you close it.

Anyway, close maya, and open the "command prompt" in the start menu (usually in the Accessories folder). Once in the command prompt, navigate to the folder containing your maya file for that shot. Type the following with changes:

render -r mr -fnc 3 -of tga -s 1 -e 250 -pad 3 -cam renderCam myshot.ma

You will need to change some of these settings to suit your needs

-r = the type of renderer. In this case "mr" stands for mental ray

-fnc = the filename order. In this case "3" = (filename)(frame number)(format) or in this case myshot001.tga. Typing in a 2 here changes it to myshot.tga.001, I think. I only use 3 because my compositing program can only import files with the proper extension. It thinks its a .001 file and not a .tga file.

-of = file format type. In this case tga = targa. If you want a jpeg file, then this should read -of jpg

-s = start frame. In this case I started on frame 1.

-e = end frame. In this case it ended on frame 250.

-pad = frame padding. 1= myshot1.tga, 2 = myshot01.tga, 3 = myshot001.tga, 4 = myshot0001.tga. I've had a problem in the past where I imported my frames into a compositor and frame 30 was put right after frame 3 or frame 11 was right after frame 1. If you give it the proper padding the program will put it in the right order.

-cam = the camera you wish to use. In this case my shot cam is named renderCam in my maya file.

myshot.ma = this is the name of my maya file. Replace this with the name of your maya file.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a little side tracked this week and decided to put together a progress reel for the work I've done so far in AM. Its not an impressive body of work by any means, but it was fun putting it together. You may notice that all of the shots look different. Thats because I spent some time rendering out each shot to make it look pretty. The shots that you've seen prior to this have been "playblasts." These are basically quick and dirty renders that are perfect for tweaking the animation. Then when you are happy with the animation, each shot is rendered out so that it looks pretty. These renders take much much longer than playblasts, so it ties up your computer for a while.

Anyway, I'm not entirely happy with everything so far. The obstacle course shot is too dark, the first bouncing ball shot has some video glitches and some of the poses need lighting help (all of the white background ones haven't been touched yet). Plus the music has some glitches in it also.

I'll be updating this reel at the end of the term, so check back later.

Update: This video has been removed. An updated version is located in the "Session 112" entry

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the week that I had been waiting for. Arcs and path of action! I had heard people mention this principle but I really didn't understand when to use it. It turns out that I should have been using it with just about every movement I animated. I'm sure I can already look back at my previous animation and laugh. I never thought about arcs and I think that is one of the many reasons why my previous work sucked. Man, I'm glad I decided to fork out the dough for AM, because I'm learning so much!

This week we were supposed to animate a ball with a tail. I tried to put arcs in everything in this one. Seriously, I've got to get back to work. Tootles

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about overlapping action. Its an interesting principle of animation that is so vital for making your animation loose and organic. The idea here is that when something moves not every part of that object moves at the same time. For example, when you swing your arm, you move your shoulder, then your elbow, then your wrist. Our assignment was to practice this idea by animating a pendulum moving across the screen. I had the hardest time getting the platform to move like it is now. I wrastled with the Graph Editor again for way too long. Anyway, got to get back to work.

Posted by Danny Southard at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This week we learned about Anticipation and Squash & Stretch. The video lecture was pretty cool. To show the importance of anticipation they had a bunch of videos of people jumping, playing golf, throwing balls, etc, but they cut out all of the frames with anticipation in it. It was funny watching people jump in the air without crouching down first to store up energy for the jump. My favorite ones were of the person playing golf. He lined up for his shot and then all of a sudden he hit the ball without even pulling the club back. Funny stuff.

The squash & stretch stuff was interesting too. Most of it was review, but it was interesting to hear it again. I figure if I hear it enough times it should stick eventually.

The assignment this week was a long one. We were required to plan out and animate a basketball/soccerball bouncing through a provided obstacle course. Sounded pretty easy…..but it was by far the hardest assignment so far. I found myself cursing at and flipping off my monitor more times than I can remember in the hopes that Maya would cooperate. I fought the Graph Editor almost the whole time. Those damn curves wouldn’t go the way I wanted them. Sorry, for some of you none animators reading my blog…..wait does anyone besides my mom read my blog?.......anyway, for those of you that aren’t familiar with Maya, there is a Graph Editor that essentially shows all of your animation in the form of curves. It’s a hard tool to master because its really difficult to figure out what your animation is doing when you are staring at a bunch of curves on a graph. I’ve tried to avoid the graph editor as much as I could in the past and I think that’s partially why my animation has sucked. I’m glad we are starting off with something easy like a bouncing ball so I can learn to utilize the graph editor or at least fight it less.

With this assignment I blocked out everything in pose to pose and then adjusted my timing in the graph editor. Then I went back to the animation, put in my breakdowns, and returned to graph editor again. The rest of my time was spend here, tweaking points and tangents. For some of the animation, my pose to pose stuff was fine, but for a majority of it, I found that I was fighting to get it working right. I ended up throwing out most of my poses and working in a layered fashion, getting the timing of each component of the movement before moving on to the next. I worked on this bad mamma jamma for way too long and I’m happy to finally be finished with it. I learned a lot in this assignment, so hopefully if I have to do something like this in the future, I won’t do as much fight and cursing as I did this time.

The other parts of the assignment were to sketch some dynamic poses, sketch some devastating poses, and pose Stu is our favorite devastated pose. Man, finding poses this week was hard. Most of the magazines that I looked through didn’t have much of anything useful. I tried looking up pictures on the internet, but that was a bust because most people don’t label their pictures with “dynamic” or “devastated.” I would’ve probably been better off going to a softball game or watching people play in the park.

I apologize if this post is bit esoteric, but it would take a long time to explain everything and frankly I don’t think anyone would benefit from my ramblings about things like curves, tangents and the like. So with that, I give you……pretty pictures.

Posted by Danny Southard at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)