Datasheet
To animate something properly, though, you might need quite a lot of setup beyond
just modeling. Depending on the kind of animating you’ll be doing, you might need to set
up the models for however you’ll be animating them. For example, for character anima-
tion you will need to create and attach an armature, or skeleton, to manipulate to make
the character move, like a puppet, and do your bidding.
Taking the models you’ve spent hours detailing and reworking and giving them life is
thrilling and can make any detailed modeling and setup routine well worth the effort.
Chapters 8 and 9 cover animation techniques in Maya.
Lighting
Lighting can be the most important part of CG. During this step, you set up virtual lights
in your scene to illuminate your objects and action. Lighting can drastically alter the look
of your scene; it greatly affects the believability of your models and textures and creates
and heightens mood.
Although you can set up some initial lights during the texturing of the scene, the seri-
ous lighting should be the last thing you do, aside from changes and tweaks.
The type and number of lights you use in a scene greatly affect not just the look of your
scene, but also the amount of time the scene takes to render. Lighting becomes a careful
dance between pragmatics and results. It is perhaps the subtlest part of CG to master.
Once you gain more experience with lighting, you’ll notice it will affect every part of
your CG creation. You’ll find that you’ll start modeling differently—modeling with the
final lighting of the scene in mind. Texturing will change when you keep lighting tech-
niques in mind. Even your animation and staging will change a bit to take better advan-
tage of efficient, powerful lighting.
This is because CG is fundamentally all about light. Manipulating how light is created
and reflected is what you’re doing with CG. Without light we would not see anything, so
it makes sense that simulating light is the most influential step in CG.
As you’ll learn in Chapter 10, virtual lights in Maya are similar to lights used in the real
world, from a single point of light such as a bulb to directed beams such as spotlights.
Rendering
At this stage, your computer takes your scene and does all the computations to create
raster images for your movie. Rendering time depends on how much geometry is used in
the scene, as well as on the number of lights, the size of your textures, and the quality and
size of your output. The more efficient your scene, the better the render times.
A lot of people ask how long they should expect their renders to take or how long is too
long for a frame to render. It’s a subjective question with no answer. Your frames will take
as long as they have to take for them to look the way you want. Of course, if you have tight
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