Datasheet
CG production itself has an involved number of steps that are usually defined by the
needs of the production. We’ll peer into 3D work flow in the next section, but to make a
long story short, 3D scenes are created, lit, and animated in the production phase. Most
of the CG techniques you’ll learn in this book are part of the production phase.
Postproduction
Once all the scenes have been set up with props and characters and everything is ani-
mated, postproduction can begin. Postproduction for a CG project is similar to post-
production for a film. This is where all of a CG film’s elements are brought together and
assembled into final form.
Rendering
All CG scenes need to be rendered to their final image or movie files. Again, this is the
process by which the computer calculates how everything in the scene should look and
displays it. It is a process that makes great processing demands on your computer, usually
requiring the full attention of your PC, and it can take a good amount of time. As you’ll
learn throughout this book, decisions you make in creating the objects in a scene can
make a big difference in how the rest of the process goes.
You can render one scene while another scene is in production, but working on a sys-
tem that is rendering is not advisable unless you’re using a dual-processor machine with
plenty of memory. When everything is rendered properly, the final images are sorted and
the assembly of the CG project begins. Rendering is the subject of Chapter 11. Three more
postproduction activities are advanced topics, beyond the scope of Introducing Maya:
compositing, editing, and adding sound; you will find a multitude of books on these top-
ics available for further study.
Compositing
Quite often, CG is rendered in different layers and segments and needs to be put back
together. In a particular scene, for example, multiple characters interact. Each character
is rendered separately from the others and from the backgrounds. They are then all put
together in compositing, the process of bringing together scene elements that were created
separately, to form the final scene. Maya makes this process easier with Render Layers,
which you will experience in Chapter 11, “Maya Rendering.”
Compositing programs such as Shake and After Effects not only allow you to compose
CG elements together, they also give you some additional control over color, timing, and a
host of other additions and alterations you can make to the scene. Compositing can greatly
affect the look of a CG project; professionals consider it an integral part of CG creation.
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