Lab 4: Music and Animation
IDS252: 3D Animation, Fall 2009

Goals

• Become familiar with setting and adjusting keyframes and timing.
• Import music into Maya.
• Create an image or animation that responds to a sound.
• Combine the image or animation with the sound using Adobe Premier Elements.

Folder and File Structure

In this lab, you will be working exclusively on the enfuzion drive and not your H-drive. Everything for this lab will be in the folder

Within this folder you will find the following subfolders:

• \IDS252Fa09\Lab4\WorksSpace\#_your_name: This is where you will place all of your Maya projects and files.
• \IDS252Fa09\Lab4\Resource: Contains the supplementary files you will need for this lab. You should copy these files over to your WorkSpace folder and place them in the appropriate project folder. These files can also be downloaded below.
• \IDS252Fa09\Lab4\SoundFiles: Contains your assigned sound files. You should copy your sound file over to your WorkSpace folder and place it in the appropriate project folder.
• \IDS252Fa09\Lab4\FinalAnimations: This is where you will place your final animation (with sound). Make sure that the name of the file you copy into this folder includes your name.

Directions

1. Tutorials: In Maya, go to the tutorials on Animation (under Learning Resources;Tutorials;Getting Started with Maya;) and work through

   • Animation - Lesson 1: Keyframes and the Graph Editor

     The file you will need for this lesson is called Keyframing.mb which can be downloaded here (Keyframing.mb). Copy Keyframing.mb into your project folder.

   • Polygon Texturing - Lesson 1: UV texture mapping. This is a fun and useful tutorial but if you feel you just don't have the time, feel free to skip it.

     The file you will need for this lesson is a Photoshop file (the tutorial will tell you how to read this into Maya) and can be downloaded here (UVLesson.psd). After you create your project on enfuzion (in your named folder in WorkSpace), copy UVLesson.psd into this project folder.

   Note, the above lessons will not be collected.

2. Responding to Music

   In last week's lab, you created a scene that conveys a mood based on a word that you were given. In this lab, you will be assigned a sound and asked to respond to that sound. You are to respond by creating a very brief and simple animation, ideally of no more than 1-4 seconds. If your sound is longer than your animation, you can fill the beginning or end of the sound by extending the first or last frame of your animation. All of the needed steps will be described below.

3. Music Assignment: The sound files can be found on enfuzion in the folder: \IDS252Fa09\Lab4\SoundFiles.

   Your assignment is as follows (these will be ready by lab on Tuesday):

   Kiersten	ALsound1.aif	Michael	AWSoundnumba1.aif
   Ivan	bpsound1.aif	David	BSsound1.aif
   Katy	BSsound1.aif	Rex	CMsound1.aif
   Kevin	DRsound1.aif	Wouter	MRsound1.aif
   Andy	MWsound1.aif	Chris	TSRmysound1.aif
   Matt	ALsound1.aif	Brad	AWSoundnumba1.aif
   Wesley	bpsound1.aif	Megan	CMsound1.aif
   Peter	DRsound1.aif	John	MWsound1.aif
   Patrick	TSRmysound1.aif	Jeff	ALsound1.aif

4. Project Structure: When you create your new project (through Maya) on enfuzion, please include an "images" subfolder. The reason for this is that, when you create animations, you will be generating hundreds of images (i.e. frames). Your project folder will get very cluttered if these images are not rendered into a separate subfolder in your project. By including an "images" folder in your project, Maya will know to store all of the images in this separate folder.

   Before beginning this part of the assignment, copy the above sound into your Maya project folder.

   Listen to the sound repeatedly before deciding how to respond.

5. Loading Music into Maya:

   You will be loading the sound file into Maya as described below.

   Instructions:

   1. It is assumed that you already have your project created and have copied your sound file into this project.
   2. Below are the key things that you need to do. Note, more detailed directions for importing sound files can be found in the Maya Help (do a search on "import an audio file") :
      • Before you begin, you need to 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 Time Slider category. Where is says "Playback Speed", select "Real-time (30fps). Note, if you don't do this, you won't be able to hear the sound. Click the Save button to exit.
      • To load in a sound file, go to File;Import... from Maya's main menu. Select the sound file you copied into your project folder (if your project is not set, Maya will place you in the wrong folder. You should always set the project).
      • To see the sound wave in the timeline at bottom of Maya window, right click on the timeline, choose Sound, and select the name of your sound file.
      • You need to expand the time range slider so you can see the entire sound wave. To do this, put a 0 into the boxes on the bottom left (below the slider) and put a large number (e.g. 1000 or more) into the boxes on the right. The sound ends where the green sound wave stops. Readjust the bottom right boxes so that they are set to the time value where the sound ends.

6. Creating the Animation:

   • Listen and respond to the sound as a whole. Don't try to animate to specific beats or other effects in the music. You just don't have this much control within the Maya software.
   • Some of the sound pieces are rather long (e.g. 30 sec). You are not to create an animation of this length. Your animation should be at most 4 seconds or 120 frames. If your sound is under 4 seconds (120 frames) then you should plan on an animation that is no longer than the sound. If your sound is longer than 4 seconds, you should plan on animating only at most 120 frames within the window of the music. In any case, keep the animation very simple; you might want to just move the camera. As in the last lab, it is the entire scene (i.e. objects, lights, textures, and camera) that create the meaning. The animation is just one small part.
   • If you want to work with a character and human expression, you may use the bloke character. To do this, save the file bloke_v1.2.0.ma and place it in your project folder. Import it (as you did in your composition) into your maya file containing the sound file. Bloke is tricky to work with - you may want to just pose him, as opposed to animating him. The camera can be used to do the animation.

7. Generating the Frames:

   In Maya, you will generate your frames as follows:

   • On the main Maya menu, choose Window;Rendering Editors;Render Settings.... Set the following:
     • the Image Format to be jpg.
     • the Frame/Animation Ext to name#.ext
     • the Frame padding to 4
     • the Start Frame and End Frame to the first and last frames of your animation.
     • under Image Size, set the Presets to 640x480. Note, if rendering is slow or files are really big, you might want to set this to 320x240 instead.
     • Go to the Maya Software tab 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.
   • Note, if you are working on the Mac side (as opposed to the Windows side) of the Ford 202 computers, then Maya will allow you to save to a single quicktime movie file (*.mov or *.qt) rather than saving to many individual frames. If you choose to go this route please ask the instructor for directions, e.g. setting compression and fixing file extensions.
   • Close the Render Settings window.
   • To render all of the frames, 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.
   • When you are done you should have all of your image files (i.e. frames) saved in the images subfolder of your Maya project. Outside of Maya, go to this folder to make sure they are really there.

8. 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.

9. Combining your Sound and Frames in a Quicktime file: To combine the frames with the music, you need to generate an animation file. We will use the quicktime format. To do this, you will be using software package Adobe Premier Elements, which is available only on the Windows side of the computers in Ford 202!

   • Open up Adobe Premier by clicking on the icon on the desktop. Click on "New Project" and save it somewhere in your Maya project folder on enfuzion.

   • Click the "Get Media" button and choose "PC Files and Folders". Navigate to the images folder where your sequence of jpg files are stored. Select the first image in the sequence. Click the checkbox labeled "Numbered Stills" at the bottom. Finally, click the open button. This should bring in and group the entire set of still frames to the Window located in the top right portion of your screen. Similarly, open your sound file. Click the "Show All" button in order to see both the sound and the images files. In the bottom part of the screen, click the TimeLine button. With the left mouse button held down, drag the image group down to the "Video 1" timeline making sure that it lines up with t=0 on the left. If it looks like nothing is there, you can zoom in by clicking the "+" (to the right of the TimeLine button). Drag the sound file down to the "Audio 1" line in the TimeLine. If the sound and video are of different lengths, ask the instructor to show you how to fix it.

   • To save to a quicktime file, go to the menu File;Export;Movie. Navigate to the folder where you will save the animation (e.g. your enfuzion workspace). Type in the desired name of your file. Before saving, click on the "Settings" button. Select the "General" category indicated on the left side of the settings window, and then on the right side, set the "File Type" to be QuickTime. Now select the "Video" category and change the Compressor setting to be MPEG-4 Video (other compression options might be ok but you need to make sure the resulting file size and quality are ok). Set the Frame Size to be 640x480 (or whatever is the size of your frames). Click Save if you want to save these settings into your Premier project, otherwise, just click OK.

     It may take a minute or two for Permier to generate the animation. When Premier is done, close Premier and, if necessary, rename the quicktime file to include your name. Be sure to run the animation to make sure it is correct. Copy your animation to IDS252Fa09\Lab4\FinalAnimations.

10. Back Up Your Files!: Make sure that you backup both the quicktime animation and the Maya project folder for this animation (minus the individual image frames/files - you can always regenerate these) to a CD or flash drive.

Evaluation

Place your final animation on \\home\enfuzion in the folder IDS252Fa09\Lab4\FinalAnimations. Be sure that the file name contains your name.