Datasheet

Sketch or download images of the props and sets you need in your scene. You should
map out the “look” for everything that you need to have in your scene. When you are
working on your project, you won’t be limited to the things you picked out at this stage;
however, you will find that knowing how things should look will help enormously in get-
ting you to your final product. The better your concept art and research, the smoother the
production and the better your end result will be.
Production
Production is the meat of any project. Film production begins when you start filming your
project. In the case of CG, production begins when you start creating assets for your proj-
ects, such as models or textures, based on well-researched reference materials. The produc-
tion phase lasts until the rendering phase, where you actualize your scene into image files.
Animation, texturing, and lighting are all performed between the modeling and ren-
dering phases. Later in this chapter, we’ll divide the CG production phase into more
stages; however, most of the techniques you’ll learn in this book are components of the
production phase.
Postproduction
Postproduction begins when your scene elements and animation are all set up and raring
to be completed. Postproduction for a CG project is very similar to postproduction for a
film. When you click the Render button, you’ll end up with several image files or movie
files that are then edited and put together to make your project. You add sound, correct
color, combine elements, and add any finishing touches in postproduction. Here is a
quick rundown of the CG postproduction pipeline.
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. Rendering makes your computer work hard. It usually requires the full atten-
tion of your PC and can take a lot of time. As you’ll learn throughout this book, the deci-
sions you make, such as how much detail you give the objects you create for a scene, can
make a big difference in the rest of the process and can affect the rendering speed.
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. Once everything has been rendered properly, the final images will be
sorted and the CG project assembly will begin. Rendering is the subject of Chapter 11,
“3ds Max Rendering.”
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