If you haven't already noticed it out by now we will be primarily using Autodesk Maya for our work in this class. Hence the title of the class......right? Yes, right. :)

I have a full page devoted to the software of this class complete with installation instructions for both Maya and Adobe Creative Cloud. Click the link and read/view the material.

In addition to installation instructions I have a list of basic tutorials on the tutorials page.. These are newly updated and more comprehensive so check them out!

Alright, so you are in this class because you have either completed the introduction course with me in the past or have covered the basics of Maya somewhere else. Either way you should have a good understanding of how the basics of 3D Computer graphics and animation work. However, understanding what tools you have and how to use them is only the beginning.

Let's take a look at a hypothetical situation.

A friend of yours is working on a low-budget film project and the director of that production needs some 3D visual effects done for it. He says that he thinks it's pretty simple stuff and remembered that you were doing 3D at school and asked if you'd be interested in doing the effects. Knowing from your professors direction that you need to get some information about the production before accepting you ask all the needed questions like, what are the effects? number of shots? final fx delivery format? etc. You excitedly take the gig and start thinking about how awesome it will be to work on a real world project. Nothing could knock you off of the mountain you are now standing on.

You wake up the next morning and head down to their studio to get the plate shots you will be working with. You have a meeting to discuss the shots in detail. You have 10 shots that involve modeling a futuristic jet that speeds through a few building shots and a close up where a missile is launched. You are excited because you modeled a jet for a project in school. You are now thinking this thing is in the bag.

You head home with the plates (background footage) and get to work. You quickly realize that modeling a jet from scratch without the book tutorials is more difficult, but you are managing alright. You crank out a model and send it to the director for approval. You get glowing responses, but a few comments for changes. The director saw a movie on the Sifi channel and really liked the tail design of this plane he saw. He sends you a blurry photo he took with his iPhone of the screen as a reference. Wanting to please the director you agree to the change. You go back to your model and to your frustration you realize the way you modeled it doesn't work well with the new design from a topology perspective and so you reluctantly approach remodeling the plane completely. No big deal, this is part of the game right.

You get approval on the model and move into animation. The director tells you how he wants the jet to move and so you feel pretty confident about handling it. You bang out some rough animation tests based on the directors requests and send them for approval. You again, get glowing remarks, but a few comments. The director really wants to see the flaps on the wings move, the engine in the back to spin and expand and a mix of flaps and panels throughout to pulse like the ship is somehow organic. WHAT! This is totally not what was requested. You are getting a bit frustrated, but again agree to give it a go, after all that's how things work.

You start trying to animate all the bits on the jet only to again realize that your model isn't built to handle the requests. You didn't model the panels the director wants you to animate as separate objects. You thought you were being creative by handling it entirely with textures. Shoot. Back to square one modifying the model to handle the new requirements. You spend all night finishing the modifications and creating a new animation test for the director. This time you are going to be smart and let him know how much work you have done for his requests and ensure that future requests be written out and agreed upon so you don't keep doing things over. He loves the animation tests and agrees to your processes.

You pump out the animation for the 9 fast flying shots and get the approval to get it rendered. You look at the schedule and figure you have 20 more days until your deadline to complete all of the shots and your render tests are showing about 5 minutes per frame render time at full HD resolution. You have 9 shots each 3 seconds long. You do the math and figure an estimation of 18 hours to render each shot. (15 min/per frame at 24fps * 3 seconds of animation = 1080 minutes. You multiply this by 9 shots and figure you have roughly 7 days straight of rendering for these shots. Not too bad. You will have 13 days left to complete 1 last closeup shot. You are flying high once again and go to sleep.

You wake up in the morning expecting to see a nice collection of fancy frames to preview only to realize that every frame is black. o_O What the?!? You spend a few minutes troubleshooting only to realize that you didn't set your camera right before setting the render and have lost 7 hours of render-time. Okay, not a huge deal, you make the change, reset the render, wait for the first few frames to render just to make sure things are working and you head off to class. You come home that afternoon and everything is still running great. You are excited and let the director know things are going well. The next morning you wake up and see that your render had crashed at 2:00am. You went to bed at 1:50am and are starting to think the computer is against you. o_O You lost another 7 hours. Throughout the next few days things work better, but you experience another crash and another erroneous scene setting. You caught them pretty quickly, but not without some loss in time. You now estimate that all of the renders will be done in a total of 10 days instead of the original 7. Not too bad, but you are starting to worry about that last shot. You keep your computer rendering at home and use the schools computer to start working on the last closeup animation. The animation comes together pretty good and after a few days of work you send it off for approval. The director loves it and gives you the go ahead to render. By now your previous 9 shots are done and you begin compositing while your last render starts. unfortunately you were estimating your render times based on the previous 15 min. per frame, but because it's a closeup and involves some fluid dynamics the renders are actually taking 30 min. per frame. You do the math for this 4 second shot (30 min/frame * 24 fps * 4s = 2880min (48 hours)). Not too bad. you have time, but cannot afford any re-renders. Needless to say you run into a couple more crashes but crank out the render with 2 days to spare and already have the previous 9 shots to the director for approval. You are doing awesome.

Unfortunately the director comes back to you and says that the shots just aren't really "popping" for him. He can't explain it, but they just don't really feel like they are there. He can live with 7 of the shots but 2 of them just aren't going to work. You look at the shots and do some research only to realize that you didn't render with motion blur. The background plate was a fast moving pan with a lot of blur and your renders don't have any blur. You try and create some fake blur in After Effects to solve it, but it's just not working. You bite the bullet and decide to render the blur in Arnold. Your render test comes back at 45 min. per frame. There isn't enough time to complete it in time. What do you do? Do you tell the director to wait? You do some asking around and learn about this thing called motion vector rendering and 2D compositing of motion blur. You do some tests and realize that this could be your saving grace. You set it up and do some render tests to find that these passes will only take 2 min. per frame. EUREKA! You que up the renders and in a couple of hours have the motion vector passes and begin compositing. Things come together really well. You are happy and the shots look great. However, doing this reveals to these 2 shots reveals that the other 7 shots really don't look good now. You calculate the time and figure you will add this motion vector pass to the other shots and deliver everything at the last minute. All goes decently well and you do. You are sleep deprived, hungry, but excited. The director is happy and you have delivered your first production.

Well that's a good story, so what?

The hypothetical story above is designed to illustrate some of the things you should expect to run into during any production. Some might look at this and think, yeah that sounds about right and they got it done on time so... all's well that ends well right?

To this I will agree with, this person was successful. However, a lot of the problems they were faced with could have been avoided right? Yeah, some of them could have.

One part of this class is going to focus on how to manage your project through it's various phases to avoid as much of these bummer moments as possible. However, not all of these issues can be avoided by knowledge or planning. Every one of the issues caused by the director are unavoidable. After all they did their due diligence to ask the right questions.

The other part of this class is balancing your production by working efficiently and smart in order to plan for as many future issues as you can so that when they arise they have minimal impact on your schedule and blood pressure.

The moral of this story is that you cannot plan for absolutely everything. You cannot prevent every issue. You will not execute flawlessly on everything. Your computer will crash. You will hit every red light on your way to delivery. Your goal should be to design everything to be easily adaptable and redirectable to minimize the impact each of these uncontrollable elements will cause. Every production you face will have its own unique challenges and problems. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM! Some things you learn in each production will solve those problems on the next one completely, but more than likely it will be the way you work that will allow the flexibility for success rather than a push button problem solving approach that you never have to build on.

What about art and technique?

I am really glad you asked. Actually, the whole point of all of this is the art. However, if the art is never finished or you die of a heart attack in the process, what's the point? As we learn advanced techniques in how to complete production modeling, rigging, animation, environments and rendering we will be spending equal amounts of time touching on how to be efficient and smart while we work.

What's a good advanced class without a bit of review. In the following video we will take a leap back in time to the intro/foundations class to revisit the concepts and practices we will be building upon in this class.

Visit the tools page for refresher videos on the Maya interface and some basic workflows.