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The Stages of Production  7
We’ll take a quick look at three more postproduction activities: compositing, editing,
and adding sound. These are advanced topics, and complete coverage is beyond the scope
of Introducing Autodesk Maya 2012. However, a multitude of books are available on these
topics for further study, and some are listed at the end of this chapter.
Compositing
Quite often, CG is rendered in different layers and segments, which need to be put back
together. In a particular scene, for example, multiple characters interact. Each charac-
ter is rendered separately from the others and from the backgrounds. They’re then put
together in compositing, or the process of bringing together scene elements that were cre-
ated separately to form the final scene. Maya makes this process easier with render layers,
which you’ll experience in Chapter 11.
Compositing programs such as Maya Composite, Nuke, Digital Fusion, and After
Effects allow you to compose CG elements together and give you some additional con-
trol over color, timing, and a host of other additions and alterations you can make to the
images. Compositing can greatly affect the look of a CG project and can be an integral
part of CG creation.
Many new animators try to generate their final images in a single rendering of their scene,
but you don’t need to do that. Realizing the component nature of CG is important; you
can use components to your advantage by rendering items separately and compositing
them together in the finishing stage. This approach gives you a lot of control in finishing
the images to your satisfaction without always having to go back, change the scene, and
re-render it.
Editing
The rendered and composited CG footage is collected and edited together to conform to
the script and boards. Some scenes are cut or are moved around to heighten the story.
This process is essentially the same as for film editing, with one big difference: the
amount of footage used.
A typical film uses a fraction of all the film or video that is shot. But because creat-
ing CG is typically more time-consuming and expensive than shooting live action,
scenes and shots are often tightly arranged in preproduction boards so not much effort
is wasted. The entire production is edited with great care beforehand, and the scenes
are built and animated to match the story, almost down to the frame. Consequently, the
physical editing process consists mostly of assembling the scenes into the sequence of
the story. This is also why a good preproduction process is important. When you plan out
what you want to get, you’re much more likely to get it.
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