rendering a movie in maya (Not really a SL question)

[Voodoo Schnyder]

Hi, I hope no one is bothered for asking this question.. I have to do this for a school project, it's not for SL.. and I wanted to know if there is any way to render a scene as avi or wmv video.

Im using maya as tool and I have a robot as model.. I want to capture a small video of that robot as a full body portrait and then zoom in to a face portrait later in the video.. for then import to adobe flash, and make it a web intro...

Is this possible? I need to know if its possible before thinking about going any further with the modelling

[Chosen Few]

Of course it's possible.  This is one of the very things Maya is for.  A program doesn't get to become the film industry standard for CGI if it can't render video, after all. 

There are two ways to go.  One is to render the video directly in Maya.  The other is to batch render the frames as a sequence of still images, and then composite them to video in AfterEffects, or in any capable video editing program. I'll talk briefly about each method.

The former approach is slightly risky, and costs you a good degree of control.  Since you're rendering just one gigantic file, you won't be able to pause the process, and then resume it again, without having to start over from the beginning.  If anything goes wrong, like if your computer crashses, or the power goes out, or it runs out of hard drive space, or if you just need to use your computer for other things, before it's finished, you're gonna be in trouble.  If the process stops in the middle for any reason, the file will be gibberish, and you're gonna have to do it all over again.

The latter method is much safer, and gives you a lot more control.  If you need to pause at any point you can.  Just stop the process, and any frames that have been rendered thus far will already have been saved as individual image files.  Nothing will have been lost.  When you want to come back to it, you can start up again from whatever frame you left off at, and it'll be all good.   Also, if any particular frame happens to comes out wrong, you only have to re-render that one frame, instead of the whole thing.

The only downside is you have to take the extra step of involving a separate program for compositing.  But that in itself also gives you a huge amount of additional control and other advantages. You'll find that when you bring AfterEffects into the mix, you have all kinds of options (some of which can save tons of time) at your disposal that you wouldn't otherwise have had.  Plus, as a side benefit, output to Flash from AfterEffects is a breeze, since Flash happens to be where you're ultimately looking to go.

 

Here's an example of how involving a compositing program gives you a ton of added freedom, and can save you untold amounts of time.  In Maya, put the subject and the background on different layers, and render the layers to different image sequences.  Obviously you'll lay the two sequences over each other, in the compositng program, to create the finished video.  What's the advantage of this, you might ask?  Well, what if you want to change one without affecting the other?  If it's already been spit out as a singular video file, you can't do that.  You'd have to start all over again.  But if it's in layers, the change is really easy.

Say you've got a character walking down a road, but then you decide you'd rather have him walking down a beach.  In Maya, render the beach to a new image sequence, and bring that sequence into AfterEffects.  Put it underneath the character layer, and turn off visibility for the road layer.   The character is now walking on the beach instead of on the road.  Done.  If it weren't all in separate layers like this, you'd have to re-render the whole thing, including the character, which would likely take far longer than just rendering the beach by itself.  Multiply that savings by all the separately chanageable elements that might be in a scene, and the savings could add up to months worth of rendering time, over the course of an entire film.

For an exaample, say you don't like the way the coloring looks on one or more of your layers.  Don't go back to Maya, and spend hours or days re-rendering the whole thing.  Simply color-correct each layer in AfterEffects. 

You might be wondering if it takes longer to render the layers separately than to just render the whole flattened composition at once.  The answer is sometimes yes, and sometimes no.  It depends on what's in the scene.  In most cases, even if it does take longer up front, the savings down the road more than make up for it.

Obviously, making this kind of compositing work at all requires that there be transparency on each layer (except the background layer).  So when you render those image sequences, do them as Targa sequences, with alpha channels.

Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg, of course.  AfterEffects can enhance your Maya-rendered videos in literally hundreds of thousands of different ways.  It gives you an analogous level of control over your videos to that which Photoshop gives you over your still images.  (Photoshop Extended has an impressive array of video tools these days, as well, by the way.)

 

Another really great feature of Maya you should know about is that it makes it amazingly easy to create preview videos, very quickly, so you can make sure everything's in place, and working properly before you actually render.  The feature is called "Playblast".  To create a playblast video, simply right-click and hold on the timeline, and then select Playblast from the context menu that pops up.  As with almost everything else in Maya, notice there's an options box next to the word "Playblast" in the menu.  I'd suggest you take a look at the options.  If you don't know what any of them are for, hit the help button at the top left of the dialog (just like with every other dialog in Maya), and you'll be shown complete explanations for all of them.

The playblast video will render in seconds, and then will automatically open in your default media player application.  It won't be at post-render quality, of course.  It will be at viewer port quality.  Watch the playblast video, to make sure things like camera movements, and other animations are functioning the way you want, before you commit to rendering.  There's nothing worse than waiting hours for something to render, and then discovering it's all useless because you didn't have the camera pointing in the right direction, or something.  Playblast will help you to prevent making those mistakes.

You can also scrub the cursor through the timeline, right in the viewer port, to see how things move, frame by frame.

 

Now let's talk about renderers.  It makes a big difference  which one you use, and of course, how you have it set.   Generally speaking, if you want really good film-quality renderings, use MentalRay (unless you've purchased something even better).  If you want things to look the way they would in a lower quality graphics environment like SL, the Maya software renderer will likely do just fine for you.  Even a playblast might be good enough for that.

 

As for creating the animation itself, from your description of what you're looking to do, it sounds like all you need to do to set things up in Maya itself is just make the camera move.  You can do that easily enough with motion paths, and/or by keyframing the camera's position, depending on what exactly you want it to do. 

One of the most beautiful things about Maya is the fact that almost every single thing in it is keyframable for animation.  In this case, we're just talking about the position of the camera, but there are countless other possibilities. 

As a super easy example, a very common way to show off 3D models is to do a simple carousel video, meaning the model spins around in place, 360 degrees.  One way to do that very quickly and easily, is just to put a camera on a circular motion path.  Instead of actually spinning the model in front of a non-moving camera, you orbit the camera around the non-moving mode.  Here's how:

 

1. Create a new perspective camera.  By default, it will be named "camera1".  You can rename it if you want.
2. Create a NURBS circle.
3. Click on the camera to select it, and shift-click on the circle to add it to the selection
4. Make sure you're in the Animation menu set in Maya, and then click Animate -> Motion Paths -> Atttach to Motion Path.  The camera will now move around the circle.  To verify that, click in the timeline, and drag the mouse, to scrub through the frames.  You'll see the camera move around the circle as you drag.  If you want to see what that camera is seeing, change the viewport panel assignment to that camera.  At the top of the viewport, click Panels -> Perspective -> camera1 (or whatever else you named it).  When you're done, change the panel back to the default camea, so you can once again work freely.
5. If it's not already there, park the model in the middle of the circle, or move the circle, so it's centered around the model. 
6. Batch render the view from the camera that is on the motion path, and you've got your carousel video (assuming the scene is already properly lit, and all that good stuff, of course).

 

If you'd rather actually spin the model, that's just as easy.  Here's how.  I'm going to assume you want the model to rotate on the Z axis.  If it's some other axis, I'm sure you can make the appropriate changes:

 

1. Select the model, and freeze its current transformations.
2. In the timeline, make sure frame 1 is highlighted.
3. Open the channel box, if it's not open already.
4. In the channel box,take a look at the value for RotateZ.  All the values should be at zero right now, since you froze transformations in step 1. 
5. Now click on the word "RotateZ".  I don't mean click in the value field next to it.  I mean click on the actual word, itself.  The word will now be highlighted, indicating that that particular channel is selected.  (Quick tip:  Whenever a node is highlighted like that, you can dynamically change its value, by middle-dragging in the viewport.  If you middle drag right now, you'll see the numerical value will change, and the model will spin accordingly.  This is handy for times when you want to work free-form, instead of strictly by the numbers.  Don't use it for this particular exercise, though.  We're going to use the numbers for this.  The tip about middle-dragging is just an FYI.)
6. Right-click and hold on the selected channel, and then choose "Key selected" from the context menu that pops up.  Notice the value flield turns orange.  This indicates the value is now keyframed.  Also notice there's now a vertical red line at frame 1 in the timeline.  This indicates the presence of a keyframe in that frame.
7. In the timeline, click to highlight later in the timeline.  Let's go with frame 24. 
8. With the model still selected, and with frame 24 highlighted, enter a value of 360 for RotateZ.
9. Now, keyframe the channel again, the same way you did in step 6.  You'll now see frame 24 in the timeline has a red line on it, just like frame 1.
10. Scrub through the timeline, and youll see the model rotates from 0 to 360 degrees, as time progrresses from frame 1 to frame 24.
11. Park the camera where you want it, and batch render the 24 frames.

Both of these methods might seem complicated, all written out like this.  But really, they each take about 10 seconds to actually do.  These are about the simplest animations you could possibly create.  The reason I explained both was so you could see how to use both.  Keyframes and motion paths are just aboutthe most foundational animation tools there are.  Since it sounds like you've got some experience with Flash, I assume you're familiar with the concepts.  Like all other animation programs, Flash uses them the exact same way Maya does.  Maya does it in 3D while Flash does it in 2D, but ultimately, it's the same thing.

 

By the way, you know all that construction history that have to delete all the time, and those transformations you have to freeze, before you export stuff out of Maya to SL?  Well, one of the primary reasons that stuff exists in the first place is for animation purposes.  Remember I said everything in Maya is keyframable?  Starting to see the possibilities here?  When you've got the complete record of how an object was created, and you can keyframe every step in that record, you can make the object do all kinds of things upon animation.  Want to make a flower grow from a seed?  Put keyframes on all the transformational steps between the two, and there you go.  Want to make a character's eyes bulge out when he sees a pretty girl walk by?  Keyframe the scale channels for his eyes.  The possibilities are endless.

 

All of the above said, it obviously would be well beyond the scope of this forum to get into much depth about how all of Maya's various animation and video creation tools work.  In this post, I've touched on maybe 0.001% of what's available.  I'd strongly recommend you read up on the topics I mentioned.  You'll find that researching those few things will also lead you to lots of other things I haven't mentioned.  It's all well worth learning about.

 

Oh, one more thing.  I'm not sure what this project of yours is all about, but you might want to consider using Unity instead of (or along with) Flash.  By putting a Unity 3D window on the web page, you could allow your users to fully explore the model, rather than just watch a video of it.  They could pan the camera around, zoom in and out, etc.  You could even incorporate a full fledged game environment, if you want to.  Unity is fantastic for this sort of thing (and for lots of other things, as well), and it works pretty seamlessly with Maya.

[Voodoo Schnyder]

Wow, thanks a lot for the well detailed post, Unity didnt cross my thoughts, I don't have any experience on it but if its web friendly, I'll research on animation and unity tutorials for when i get to that part, im still texturing the cyborg, but i'll bookmark this for now. thanks again!