Steps in Maya for Creating an Animation

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• Project Creation and Structure: When you create your new project (through Maya), you should use the default folders. This will insure that you have 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. Before you set any keyframes, it is important to set the fps because the timing can get messed up if you change the fps in the middle of animating. 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 (30 fps). 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 it 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:

  • When you are ready to render your animation to files (as opposed to just prevewing in the Render View), turn on the Color management by checking the "Apply Output Transform to Renderer":
  • Make sure that you are in the Common tab. Under the File Output section, set the Image Format to be jpg for lower quality renderings. If you want to save to a higher quality image, use png. Of course, png will result in larger images.
  • Set the Frame/Animation Ext to name#.ext or name_#.ext
  • Set the Frame padding to 3 or 4. For example, selecting 4 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 Renderable Cameras, set the Renderable Camera to the camera you want to use, e.g. your shotCam.
  • Under Image Size, use the HD 720 preset. Note, if rendering is slow or files are really big, you might want to set this to something smaller for drafts.
  • Use Mental Ray. Note, for a quick test render, you may want to use a Maya Software.
  • Close the Render Settings window.

• Playblast: 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.

• Generating the Frames: Once you are done animating, you need to render all of the frames. You can render either locally on the computer you are sitting at (batch rendering) or you can use the render farm. The render farm can really save you time if you are doing a large, computationally intense render. However, the render farm requires some practice to learn. If you use the render farm, use the Render Farm Instructions. For batch rendering on your local machine, do the following:

  • 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 (if they aren't there it is because you did not set the project properly!) Outside of Maya, go to this folder to make sure they are really there. It is actually a good idea to check this folder as the rendering is taking place to make sure it is rendering what you intended.

• 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.

  • Outside of your Maya Project, create an Editing folder. In the Editing folder, create a subfolder called images and move the images you plan to use for the animation into this images folder (this is all that should be in the images folder). The reason for moving the files is 1) to make sure you don't accidentaly overwrite your image files with Maya and 2) to make sure that you know exactly which set of images you are using for the animation (not a big deal for a 10 second animation but it will save you a lot of headaches for the 1 minute animation).

  • Optional Sound: If you are using sound in your animation, place the sound clip in the Editing folder.

  • To create the animation, you will use software Adobe Premier Pro CC 2015, which is available on the computers in Ford 202. Of course, if you own your own video editing software, please feel free to use it. Whatever you use, your final animation should be HD540 or HD720in quicktime (*.mov) format. Try to use a codec that does not result in a huge video file, e.g. <10M.

  • Project Settings: Open Adobe Premier and click on the "New Project" button. In the window that opens, enter the name for the Adobe Premiere project, e.g. Lab4EditingProject. Where it says Location:, click the Browse button, and select your Editing folder.

  • Importing the Images: Select the menu File→Import... . When the "Import" window opens, nagivate to the folder containing your images. To import a sequence of files as an image sequence, select only the first image in the squence and select the "Image Sequence" checkbox at the bottom of the window. Then, click the import button. Once your files are imported, you should see it listed in the Project tab (bottom left window). Drag and drop it over to the timeline window (bottom right).

    If the image sequence is short, it may be hard to see it in the time squence. You can zoom in by clicking the Zoom icon. . At this point, you should be able to play the sequence in view window (top right). Try it.

  • Optional Sound: If you are including sound in your animation, you will need to import it as you imported the image files. Then drag the sound file over to the timeline. Make sure it is aligned with the video. The sound and images should begin and start at the same points on the timeline.

  • Generating the Quicktime File: To generate a quicktime files, select File→Export→Media. Select the Quicktime Format and the appropriate Preset for your animation. You can try different options, for example, if your images are HD540, you can use "NTSC, H.264,AAC 48kHz":

    If you are using HD720, you can use: Then, select the Export button. When Adobe Premier is done exporting, run the animation from outside of Adobe Premier to make sure it is what you wanted and that the quality is good.

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