Animation Techniques: Rendering
Now I had my animation which I was fairly happy with I now had to battle with rendering it. Initially I thought I would be able to render it as an AVI file that could be viewed as video immediately, letting Maya do all the work. However, due to the fact I had used the Mental Ray rendering type, in order to make my glasses look like they’re made of glass, I could only export the file as a sequence of image files. I therefore had a quick search online to get an idea of what I was doing and to understand how I would then convert the individual image files into a movie clip. I opted to save the files as the Maya native IFF, as I read online that this is a fairly small file type and works well when importing into after effects to make the movie clip. I checked all the other settings and then proceeded to batch render the 770 frames of my animation. THIS TOOK FOREVER – 2 HOURS TO BE EXACT. Once I finally had the 770 individual files I imported the first into After Effects and hit the ‘sequence’ option before importing, importing the enitre 770 frames! Now all I did was rendered the file from After Effects as a Quicktime Movie animation. And we’re done!
CHARLIE MILES 