Datasheet

How It All Works Together
The process behind making a South Park episode makes for a perfect pipeline example.
Although the show appears to be animated using paper cutouts, as was the original
Christmas short, the actual production work is now done using Maya. In preproduction
on a typical episode, the writers hammer out the script, and the voice talent records all
the voices before the art department creates the visuals for the show. The script is story-
boarded, and copies are distributed to all the animators and layout artists.
Beginning the production phase, each scene is set up with the proper backgrounds and
characters in Maya and then handed off for lip-synch, the first step in the animation of the
scene. The voices are digitized into computer files for lip-synch animators who animate
the mouths of the characters. The lip-synched animation is then passed to character ani-
mators who use the storyboards and also the soundtrack to animate the characters in the
Maya scene.
The animation is then rendered to start the post, edited together following the boards,
and sent back to the sound department for any sound effects and such to round out the
scene. The episode is assembled and then sent off on tape for a broadcast.
The CG Production Work Flow
Because of the nature of CG and how scenes must be built, a certain work flow works best.
Modeling almost always begins the process, which then can lead into texturing and then
animation (or animation and then texturing). Lighting should follow, with rendering
pulling up the rear, as it must. (Of course, the process isn’t completely linear; you’ll often go
back and forth adjusting models, lights, and textures throughout the process.) Chapters 4
through 12 follow this overall sequence, presenting the major Maya operations in the
same order you’ll use in real-world CG projects.
Modeling
Modeling, the topic of Chapters 4 through 6, is usually the first step in creating CG, and
one that garners a lot of coverage in publications and tends to capture the interest of most
budding CG artists. You most often start a CG scene by creating the objects you need to
occupy your space. It can end up taking the majority of the time in your process.
There are many modeling techniques, and each could be the subject of its own series
of books. The choice of which to use usually depends on the modeler’s taste and preferred
work flow. As you’ll see, the choices are among NURBS modeling (Chapter 4), polygon
modeling (Chapter 5), and a third method that combines elements of the first two, subdi-
vision surface modeling (Chapter 6).
8 ■ chapter 1: Introduction to Computer Graphics and 3D
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