Steps in Maya for Creating an Animation

• Project Creation and Structure: When you create your new project (through Maya), you should be sure to 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.
• Setting the FPS: Once the project is created and a new scene file is opened, 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).
• Playback Speed: While still in the Preferences window, click on the Time Slider category. Where is says "Playback Speed", select Real-time (30fps) if you want the animation to playback in real time. ( Note, if you are working with sound in Maya, you must do this to hear the sound.) Click the Save button to exit.

• Render Settings: On the main Maya menu, choose Window;Rendering Editors;Render Settings.... Set the following:

  • Set the Image Format to be jpg for lower quality renderings. If you want to save to a higher quality image, use png or tif. Of course, these formats will result in a much larger image, so use them only for the very final rendering.
  • Set the Frame/Animation Ext to name#.ext
  • Set the Frame padding to 4. This will add zeros to force the number (#) to have at least 4 places, e.g. myImage0003.jpg.
  • Set the Start Frame and End Frame to the first and last frames of your animation. For example, if you are creating a 10 second animation, the first frame would be 1 and the last frame would be 300 (30 frames per second x 10 seconds = 300).
  • 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.
  • Close the Render Settings window.

• Generating the Frames: Once you are done animating, you need 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.

• Playblast: 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. You can find Playblast by going to the menu Window;Playblast.

• Generating a Quicktime Movie: To generate a quicktime (*.mov) animation, you must generate the movie outside of Maya.

  • Use software package Adobe Premier Elements, which is available only on the Windows side of the computers in Ford 202!

  • Open 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 image 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.

  • Optional Sound: If you are including sound in your animation, open your sound file as you did the image files. Once it is loaded, you may need to 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). If you have sound, drag the sound file down to the "Audio 1" line in the TimeLine. If the sound and video are of different lengths, you may need to adjust the length of one of them.

  • To generate and save the 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 some time 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.