Project Creation and Structure: When you create your new project (through Maya), is is recommended that you use the default folders. This will insure that you include an "images" subfolder. When you create animations, you will be generating hundreds/thousands 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. Sometimes, the rendering will also generate depth map files which will be placed in the Depth folder. Be sure to delete this after rendering in order to save disk space. You will never need these files after rendering is complete. See picture.
If you plan on using the renderfarm, please read about how to set the project path so that the renderfarm knows how to find your project.
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. Before you set any keyframes, you should set the fps. To do this, 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).
Render Settings: On the main Maya menu, choose Window;Rendering Editors;Render Settings.... Set the following:
Generating the Frames: Once you are done animating, you need to render all of the frames
Playblast: Note, before you render the frames, you can preview 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.
View Sequence: Once the frames are generated, you can preview the animation sequence in Maya by going to File -> View Sequence... and select the first frame in the sequence. The first pass through will be slow but then it will run at normal speed.
Generating a Quicktime Movie: To generate a quicktime (*.mov) animation, you must generate the movie outside of Maya.
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 cs-render.
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.
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 cs-render 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.
