In This Chapter

After building your scene and animating it, your final steps are usually adding a camera and rendering the animation. A camera is more than just a viewpoint, however. The camera is another part of your project's creative vision, just as movie cinematographers help tell the story by where they place and focus a camera. By working with settings such as zoom and focal length, you can make a mouse seem as big as an elephant or a skyscraper look tiny. Unlike real cameras , Maya's virtual camera has no mass or size, so it can pass through pinholes or change direction instantly. Where you position the camera and how you frame your subject matter are important details in composing your animation and adding depth to your art.

In animation, rendering is the process of generating two-dimensional images from a view of a three-dimensional scene. The images are saved as image files and can later be placed in sequence to produce an animation. You can also render still frames to sample what the final animated sequence will look like at different points. You have rendered some images in previous tutorials, but in this chapter, you'll delve into some of the options for rendering. This chapter covers the following topics:

• Cameras and views Learn what the three camera types are in Maya and how they work. You'll also find out how the views you're familiar with, such as Side and Perspective, differ in terms of camera setup.

• Camera settings Discover what attributes are available for customization so that you can fine-tune your camera setup and placement.

• Animating cameras Learn how to work through the process of animating a camera.

• The Playblast revisited You get another chance to see how the Playblast works and learn how it can save you hours of wasted render time.

• Render Globals settings You use the Render Globals window to define values for the Maya rendering engine. You'll get a chance to work with the most commonly used settings and understand what they do.

• Adding a camera for your Spooky World house Finally, you have the opportunity to add a camera to the scene you have been building and to render an animated fly-by of your scene.

Key Terms

antialiasing A rendering option that helps eliminate the "jaggies" often found between object edges and produces a smoother version of an image.

Perspective view The 3D view made up of orthographic projection.

orthographic view A 2D "flat" view of the scene, usually visualized from the front, side, or top. Perspective views exhibit foreshortening, but orthographic views do not.

focal length The Maya term for the perspective exaggeration or " wide-angle " quality of a camera. In real cameras, it's the distance from the lens to the film plane, directly proportional to the object's size in the frame.

clip planes Represent the camera's range; in Maya, cameras can see objects only within the values specified for the clip planes.

depth of field The camera's range of distance within which objects are sharply focused; also called the distance blur effect (commonly seen in photography with a subject that's in the near foreground). Objects outside the camera's depth of field (either closer to or farther away from the camera) look blurred or out of focus.

tumble Rotate the camera about its center.

track Translate the camera up, down, left, or right without changing its aim.

dolly Move the camera toward or away from its center of interest; the scene then appears larger or smaller.

zoom Camera's focal length is changed but its position in space does not move.

roll Rotating the camera around its sight line (the line connecting the camera to its center of interest).

scrub To drag time forward and backward so you can check animation in a view. This is done by LMB-dragging in the Time Slider.

batch render A background process that allows you to render a sequence of frames (rather than a single still image) while continuing to work in Maya; these frames are stored in the Images directory for your project.

Hotkeys to Memorize

Ctrl+d duplicate

s set an animation key

Shift+W set a key for Translate mode

[ camera view undo

] camera view redo