A big part of being a successful artist in any field is your portfolio. As an animator your primary and almost exclusive responsibility is in movement, not in final look. However, your portfolio isn't only going to be viewed by animation supervisors who are only looking at motion. It will do you well to take the animations you make and get them to a polished look to make your portfolio that much more appealing no matter what the audience is.

This week is all about going through a very basic process to make a few of your animations have a final polished look in utilizing Maya's rendering engine instead of just generating playblasts.

Finalization

1. Please choose your favorite 3 animations from this semester.
2. Open the first of the animation scene files.
3. Position your camera (if it isn't locked) to your desired angle
4. Open the render settings (Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings) and check in the common tab:
   • the output directory for the rendered images. Note this location for later.
   • the filename of the rendered files. Ensure it is unique to the scene you are rendering.
   • the start and end frame matches that of your animation timeline.
   • format is set to "name.#.ext"
   • the camera is set to the correct one. Could be persp or shot_cam. Double check in the bottom of the viewport to be sure.
5. Make any changes to the scene lighting, environment, materials, etc. to the extent you are comfortable in Maya.
6. Do a couple of still frame render tests throughout your animation to ensure that it looks correct. Also note the render time to estimate the total time it will take to render.
7. Kick off a sequence render from the render menu
8. wait and monitor your render to ensure it finishes every frame.
9. Once the sequence render is complete double check the rendered images to ensure every frame rendered as expected. If not, you may need to re-render specific frames, sequences of frames, or the entire sequence. Hopefully not though :)
10. Utilize After Effects, Premiere, or other video software to transform your rendered image sequence into a compressed .h264 MP4 video. See the conversion videos on the tutorials page for instructions on how to do it
11. Repeat these steps for each of your 3 chosen animations.
12. Once you have your 3 compressed movie files submit them in UNM Canvas