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time or budgetary constraints, you want simple scenes to keep the render resources
and times to a minimum. But the general rule in production is, you’re always out of time,
so the most efficient pipeline will be your savior, and eventually your producer or boss
will tire of hearing, “But I’m still rendering.”
As you learn, use as many lights and as much geometry as you can handle for your
scenes. The more experience you pick up, the better your eye will become for efficiency.
It’s important to understand how a scene is put together before you learn to efficiently
put a scene together.
Core Concepts
3D animation draws from many disciplines. In learning Maya, you’ll work with concepts
derived not only from computer graphics but also from design, film and cinematography,
and traditional animation. Here’s a summary of the most important of those concepts as
they apply to Maya.
Computer Graphics Concepts
Knowing a bit about the general terminology and methodology of computer graphics will
help you understand how Maya works. Let’s begin with the crucial distinction between
raster (bitmapped) and vector graphics and how this distinction affects you as a Maya user.
Raster Images
Raster images (synonymous with bitmapped images) make up the world of computer
images today. These images are displayed through the arrangements of colored pixels on
screen or dots on a print to display an image. Everything you create in Maya will eventu-
ally be seen as a raster image, even though you create it using vectors.
Raster image programs such as Painter or Photoshop let you adjust existing settings
such as color, size, and position for all or part of an image. They let you paint onto a
scanned picture or a virtual canvas to adjust or create the pixels yourself. These programs
essentially affect pixels directly, giving you the tools to change pixels to form images. For
instance, you can use a scanned photo in Photoshop to paint the side of your house red to
see what it might look like before you run down to the local paint store.
Recall from the beginning of this chapter that a raster or bitmap image is a mosaic of
pixels, each pixel corresponding to a mosaic tile. The resolution—fineness of detail—of an
image is defined by the number of pixels per inch (or other unit of measure) in the horizon-
tal and vertical directions. Because they are based on a grid of a fixed size, raster images do
not scale up well. The closer you get to a raster image, or the larger a raster image is scaled,
the bigger the pixels become, making the image look blocky, or pixelated. To make large
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