Lab 3: Introduction to Animation
IDS252: Computer Animation Production, Fall 2007

Goals

• Become familiar with setting and adjusting keyframes and timing.
• Create a 10 second animation loop.
• Save the animation to a quicktime file and place it on \\home\enfuzion.

Directions

1. Maya Tutorials In the Maya tutorials, go to Learning Resources, then within that, go to Getting Started with Maya, and finally within that go to Animation. Work through the lessons under

   • Lesson 1 (Keyframes and the Graph Editor)
   • (optional) Lesson 2 (Set Driven Key)
   • (optional) Lesson 3 (Path animation)

   The files you need for these lessons should be located on the C drives of the machines in 411 or 412 at

   C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya8.5\GettingStartedLessonData\Anim

   OUTSIDE OF MAYA, COPY THESE OVER TO YOUR H-DRIVE BEFORE YOU BEGIN.

   Note: These animations are not to be turned in. They are purely for you to learn how to animate!

2. 10 Second Animation: You are to create a 10 second animation that is a loop, i.e. it ends exactly where it begins. The subject matter is less important than getting the motion to "feel right".

   Note, next week you will give this animation to a student in the music class for them to score.

   Keep It Simple!: I suggest you use basic keyframing. Choose simple shapes to animate. Put more effort in getting the timing and movement to work than on modeling the objects. Feel free to use objects you created in labs 1 and 2. If you are at a loss as to what to do, just try a simple collection of bouncing balls. Try to get each ball to have its own personality, e.g. amount of bounce and feeling of weight. Experiment with squash and stretch and other principles of animation as best you can. The bouncing ball is the classic beginning assignment in most animation classes.

   Storyboards and Storyreels: If there is time in class, we will discuss creating storyboards and reels to establish timing.

   Initial Maya Setup:

   • For this project, you are to work directly on \home\enfuzion and not your H drive. Working on \\home\enfuzion allows you to use the Enfuzion RenderFarm to speed rendering. Note, we won't use the renderfarm in this lab but we will soon. In addition, creating animations can use a lot of disk space and may overwhelm your H drive. In previous versions of Maya, if you ran out of disk space then Maya would not warn you when you tried to save. Instead, it just didn't save your file! I don't know if this has been fixed in the latest version, but I don't really want to be in a position to test it out.

   • Create a new Maya project on \\home\enfuzion in the folder IDS252Fa06\Lab3\your_name. This time, have Maya generate the project subfolders. That is, click the "Use defaults" button in the Project window to generate subfolders in your Maya project.

   • Before you begin your 10 second animation, set the frames-per-second (fps) to 30. The tutorials use 24 fps but for digital (as opposed to film) 30 fps is the standard. To set the fps, go to the main Maya menu, choose Window;Setting/Preferences;Preferences.... In the Preferences window, click on Settings. In the pull-down menu labeled Time, choose NTSC (30FPS). This sets the animation to 30 frames per second (fps). While still in the Preferences window, click on the Timeline category. Where is says "Playback Speed", select "Real-time (30fps). Click the Save button to exit.

   • In the range slider at the bottom of the main Maya window, set the start of frame to 1 and the end frame to 300. This will give you 10 seconds of animation.

3. Saving your Animation: You can view the animations either by using the time controls at the bottom of the Maya screen or by using Playblast. Playblast gives more accurate timing. Both of these are described in the tutorials. However, to view the animation outside of Maya, you need to save the animation to an animation file. We will use the quicktime (*.mov) format. The first step is to generate the individual frames in Maya. The next step is to generate the quicktime file from the frames. Both are described below.

   Generating the Frames: In Maya, you will generate the 300 separate frames as follows:

   • On the main Maya menu, choose Window;Rendering Editors;Render Settings.... First, set the Frame/Animation Ext to name#.ext and set the Image Format to be Tiff. Make sure the Start Frame and End Frame are set to the first and last frames of your animation (for a 10 second animation this should be 1 and 300).
   • Under Resolution, choose the Presets to be 640x480. Note, if rendering is slow or files are really big, you might want to set this to 320x240 instead.
   • Choose the Maya Software tag and set the Quality to Production Quality. This will slow down the render process so you should use this setting only for the final render. Use a lower quality for previewing. Close this window.
   • You may render locally on the machine where you are working or you may use the renderfarm. To render locally, set the menu selector (drop down menu at top left corner of screen) to Rendering. Then, go to Maya's main menu, choose Render;Batch Render. To see the status of what is happening, you can choose Render;Run Render Diagnostics.

     If you really want to use the renderfarm ... ask the instructor during lab.

   • When you are done you should have a 300 tif files saved in the images subfolder of your Maya project. Outside of Maya, go to this folder to make sure they are really there. Note, these are very large files so don't keep around any that you don't absolutely need.

   Creating a Quicktime file: To view the animation, you need to generate an animation file. We will use the quicktime format because that is what the the music students are going to need. To do this, you will be using software package Adobe Premier Elements 2.0. Note, Adobe Premier Elements is available on the five computers in Collins 412. To get into 412 the room, there is a lockbox with a combination lock containing the room key. In class, you will be given the combination.

   • Open up Premier by clicking in the icon on the desktop. Create a new project and save it somewhere in your Maya project folder on enfuzion.

   • Click the Add Media button and choose "from Files or Folders". Go to the images folder where the sequnce of tiff files is stored. Select the first image in the sequence. Click the checkbox labeled "Numbered Stills" at the bottom. Finally, click the open button. This should add the sequence to the Media Window located in the top left portion of your screen. With the left mouse button held down, drag the sequence down from the Media window to the Video 1 timeline making sure that it lines up with t=0 on the left.

   • To save to a quicktime file, go to the menu File;Export;QuickTime. Under "Custom", choose LAN(1024k) 640x480. A window will appear asking where you want to save the quicktime file. Save the file in your project folder on enfuzion.

     It will take a little time to do the conversion. When Premier is done, close Premier and rename the quicktime file to include your name and the lab number. Place your final animation on \\home\enfuzion in the folder IDS252Fa07\Lab3\FinalAnimations. Please delete the individual tiff files because they take up a lot of space; you may always regenerate them if you need them later.

4. Back Up Your Files!: Make sure that you backup both the quicktime animation and the Maya project folder for this animation (minus the tiff files) to a CD or flash drive. The project folder won't be collected but you should be able to produce it if requested.

Evaluation

It is very important that this animation be completed by the beginning of class on Wed Sept 19. We will be turning over the animations to the music students at that time. If yours is not complete, it will not be scored. This will significantly hurt your final grade for the lab.

You animations will be graded on the following:

• Does your animation loop properly?
• Does the motion feel right?
• Did you get your animation done in time to be scored?