Getting an Animation Rendered and ready to roll

# 1 01-03-2008 , 05:37 AM

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Join Date: Feb 2008

Posts: 2

Getting an Animation Rendered and ready to roll

Hi everybody!

I've been working with graphics for years now, but Maya... well Maya takes the cake for me. Photoshop wasn't this bad, neither was Final Cut. Maya's about the worst I've ever run into for sheer enigmatic UI. I'm begging you guys to help a poor nub out.

I have an animation set up in Maya 8.5. It looks good in the playblast, and the individual frames look good too. Now, I want to make a .mov or an .avi out of it, but for the life of me... I can't work it out. I've googled and googled and googled all day, but I can't seem to find the answer I'm looking for. The commands listed in the stick thread don't seem to exist in my version. user added image

I've gone into the settings, made sure to stipulate that we start with frame 1 and go to frame 100, but it won't let me chose any kind of video format for the animation. Am I completely missing out on a major step in this process? Am I going to have to render each frame and reassemble by hand in something like Image Ready? I think I'd rather give birth to a fifty-pound porcupine.

I'm running on a Mac, if that makes any difference.

Thanks so much.

Last edited by gaddash; 01-03-2008 at 05:40 AM.

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# 2 01-03-2008 , 06:38 AM

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Join Date: Jun 2004

Location: Nottingham

Posts: 344

In order to render out into video, you need to do the following:

1: Go into your render globals.
2: Set the image format to AVI.
3: Select your compression and set your start and end frame.
4: Batch render away

However you will get better results using the following:

1: Go into render globals again
2: Set the frame/animation ext to name_#.ext (which will produce something like boat_1.jpg
3: set the image format to a lossless format
4: set your start and end frame again and also depending on the amount of frames set the frame padding (if you have say 100 frames set the frame padding to 3 and it will call your images in sequence from 001,002,003 ect. instead of 1,2,3) This helps to keep an order, and some image to video editors will get confused.
5: Batch render away
6: Get a program like video mach that you can load an image sequence into in one click, and then render down into video from there.

The last method will allow you to play with settings and compression with a much smaller time invested.

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# 3 01-03-2008 , 05:32 PM

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Join Date: Jul 2006

Location: London

Posts: 567

there's also a free video tutorial on this site...

https://www.simplymaya.com/movie_page...html?tut_id=49

Chris

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# 4 01-03-2008 , 07:07 PM

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Join Date: Feb 2008

Posts: 2

There's no sign of anything called "Render globals" in my application, and in the Render Settings, there's no .avi or .mov formats in the file format dropdown.

I was finally able to get an image batch to work.... but it's from the persp camera, which has no movement. In spite of selecting "look through" the animated camera before starting the batch, I get 100 frames of the set from about 50 light-years away.

Any ideas?

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# 5 01-03-2008 , 10:44 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Posts: 3,708

i think render globals is called render settings in newer versions of maya. It's the little button with the two circles next to the render buttons (they look like film clip boards, or whatever they are called) you can also find it in the render window.

To render through your moving camera, just select it in the render globals/settings box under camera.

you'd rather give birth to a 50 pound porcupine?? user added image

arran3D

arran3D blog

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# 6 03-03-2008 , 07:05 PM

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Join Date: Dec 2006

Location: Temecula, CA

Posts: 53

Without a doubt, render frames then use something like Premiere to composite them into video. If you render video and there is a hiccup, you have to start all over again. If you render frames, you can even stop your render then go back and start again from where you stopped.

The flexibilty of the video is 100 times better in the video rendering programs like Premiere.

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# 7 03-03-2008 , 09:37 PM

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Join Date: Jul 2006

Location: london

Posts: 519

I had trouble when i first started too. The best way and best results is to follow the link bendingiscool posted. Use Targa images, they are better than jpgs.

You'll get the hang of it. Its a very good tutorial.

those who succeed are only the failures that never gave up.

https://www.vimeo.com/7080130

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Getting an Animation Rendered and ready to roll

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