This is our final lesson on our 3-part modeling task, which involved choosing an object to model (hard surface), doing research and planning, creating it in Maya and finally presenting it on an animated turntable. My chosen object, or rather character, was Wall-E, but I, unfortunately, couldn’t finish him in time for this lesson. I will be continuing that model in my spare time and hopefully reaching the final stage of presenting professionally using the skills I was taught in this lesson. You can see the progress of my Wall-E model here.
In order to fully complete the tasks today and have something to present, I whipped up a new model in under 30 minutes. I got to have fun and break the rules a little since this wasn’t my main model. We were supposed to do hard-surface only, but I wanted to experiment with soft-select and make a fun little character. I wasn’t going for anything complex because I was not skilled enough for that, but seeing what I could do free reign and modeling with no goal in mind was really interesting and relaxing. I didn’t plan out what my character was supposed to look like at the end, so I created something entirely new and unique from scratch. Even parts that I didn’t particularly like added up to the characters strange funky cuteness, like the ears and eyes. I also tried to create legs, but nothing felt right, so I followed my gut and created some disks instead. In the end, it looked like some ’80s based character in the future with the floating disks, and my friend named him Crumpet, so that was what stuck. I think this was an important experience for me because I plan to improve in 3D modeling, specifically character modeling, which I enjoy far more (this task confirmed it) even if I’m not pursuing it as a career. One day, I hope to look back at this model, my first original 3D character and laugh at how much I’ve improved and how bad I used to be. We all have to start somewhere and I think my first attempt is pretty funny!
For our turntable renders, we were going to produce two types to then combine for a final presentation. The first would be the model in white and the second would be the model with its wireframe on view, to show how it was built. We were shown how to do both before being allowed to apply them ourselves:
Ai Materials Demo
Assign a new material to the object and go into the Arnold options. There, select ‘Aiambientinclision’. If you render now, you will see the turntable and model completely white, in their most basic form.
To do this with the wireframe on the object, repeat the same steps but choose ‘Aiwireframe’ instead. The render will look a little strange because it will most probably be in tris, which is unappealing and dysfunctional. To change it to polygons, go into the attribute editor having selected the objects and in the drop-down menu next to ‘edge type’, choose polygons.
The above is what my two monitors looked like after I tried out the Ai Ambient Inclusion material. I wasn’t ready to render just yet and was still tweaking my model, but seeing the plain white shader before using it was nice! After a brief period, we were also given the next set of instructions and told to follow through when ready.
Turntable Animation Demo
First, since we were animating, we had to change Maya’s functions. In the context menu in the top left, we changed ‘modeling’ to ‘animation’ and then selected our objects in object mode. Then, in the ‘visualize’ tab at the top, we scrolled down to ‘create turntable’ and checked the box next to it, for the turntable options to pop up. These weren’t as many as I thought surprisingly, and all we really had to do was choose the direction (I stuck with clockwise) and frame number. We were instructed to put 159 in order to achieve seamless rotation; 160 would mess up the animation changeover due to the one extra frame. After clicking apply, we noted that the word turntablecamera1 showed up at the bottom of the screen, along with a blue line to show there is a sequence of frames. The final couple of things we needed to do were changing the values of the boxes under the timeline to 159 so that everything matched, and changing the playback speed to a more appropriate number. This was done by going into the animation preferences (man-with-a-cog icon in the bottom right) and under the playback speed part, choosing 24fps x 1. Now when the animation was played, it rotated at a comfortable pace, so that the eyes could take in the model fully.
Technically, the demo was complete. However, were given some optional steps to further refine how the model turned. When played fully, easy ease was automatically applied so that it slowed at the beginning and towards the end. Some people liked this, but for those who wanted to change it, ctrl + shift + a was pressed to show the keyframes, and then in ‘Windows’, ‘animation editors’, ‘graph editor’ was selected. There, you could click the icon with the straight line coming from the small square, which was ‘linear tangents’, and this straightened the curve that could be seen on the graph, which represented the speed of the animation.
Although I liked the easy ease effect, I applied the linear rotation to my animation because we had two different types of renders (ambient and wireframe) so the slowing down and speeding up was a little distracting. If I were to render with one material, I would include it because I like how it looks.
The next part of the lesson was about rendering. There are two types of renders that can be done, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:
Batch Render – a method of rendering launched in a separate session of Maya, using a saved copy of a scene file. Batch renders allow you to continue working on a scene while it is being rendered, launch renders remotely, and render scenes faster than from within the Maya user interface, however does give your work a watermark.
Sequence Render – Render Sequence will do the same as batch rendering, but will write the frames to the render view, effectively locking the application up until the render is done. This is a more risky method, as you can’t really do other things whilst waiting for it to finish, however, there is no watermark at the end.
In the lesson, we were taught how to do the batch render, since it is industry practice and would be most beneficial to know. However, a classmate also knew how to do a sequence render, and showed a small group of us using our ambient turntable animations. I’ll be putting both sets of instructions in this post even though I only did sequence renders for my animation.
Batch Render Demo
Open the render settings panel, which is an option of the same name under ‘Render’ at the top. From there, you can change the file name, image format (PNG) and renderer that will be used (make sure this is Arnold Renderer). The frame/animation extension can also be changed depending on what is most clear to the user, e.g. [name_#.ext]. This can be seen in action at the top of the window, where example frames will be shown as named in the folder. One huge benefit here is if Maya crashes during the process, you don’t have to start again. You can pick up where the rendering stopped by deleting the last frame in the folder and putting that frame number in the first frame range box. Finally, the image size preset should be HD_1080, for nice video quality. Next, the window can be closed and the actual rendering can begin. In the top left, change Maya’s context menu to ‘rendering’ and go to ‘render’, ‘batch render’. The process will then begin, sometimes without any visual clues. To see what Maya is doing, you can enter on the script editor, which is located in the bottom right tab and will show each individual frame being rendered out.
Sequence Render Demo
Similarly to the batch method, in the render settings, change the extension name (I used name.#.ext) and the file type to PNG or JPEG. Make sure the start and end frames match, choose where to save the folder and click apply and close. All 159 of my frames were rendered this way during my lunch break, and I found a neat, full folder ready for the final step when I got back. This involved Premiere Pro. Once you open it up, create a new project and import the first image of the folder, but, making sure to tick the ‘image sequence’ box before doing so. All of the frames are then imported as a clip, which can be dragged into the timeline and edited as necessary. I did this for both of my render types (ambient inclusion and wireframe) and put them together for the final video.
I didn’t like that my character looked quite creepy with the brightly lit wireframe material, so I went back to Maya quite a bit to try and tweak it and change the brightness level. It was difficult to find a balance between clearly seeing the topology and making the character too dark because it had a lot of polygons and this made the geometry dense. I do wish I had gone back and raised the brightness a bit more since it’s too difficult to see. Because I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the animations, I also created a normal image render. I am pleased to have learned both methods however since they will be incredibly useful when presenting fully completed models in the future.
