Rendering

To render out my animation I needed to do a few things. Here is what I did.

Landscape box surrounding my character

 To get rid of the blackness and the reference images I put my character in a box. I of course textured the sides of the box. I can select the faces of the box to get 5 of the sides a sky blue and the one appropriate side a nice grass green. This is nice simple background that allows the focus to be upon my character instead of the landscape and also doesn't eat up my time.

Preset lighting

 Then in a test render I realized there was a slight lighting issue. Maya has preset lighting but it isn't very effective when it comes to rendering. These lights always face towards the grid and, more times than not, can't been seen through polygons. This is fine with me. I don't really like the preset lights anyways.

Lighting options in Maya

 I fixed this by adding my own lights. I went with an ambient light. An ambient light puts light everywhere and it casts no shadows. This was an east way to solve my lighting problem.

Ambient light added in.

 Though lighting can be so hard! Getting the color right is very difficult. Getting the right mix of yellow, orange, white, and black is very hard. You also need to mess with the intensity. All of these factors will get you different effects. I struggled with getting an outdoor look. I eventually got what I wanted though. Don't worry.

Camera added in

After the lighting is situated, the camera is added! Figuring out how to position the camera and setting key frames can be one the hardest things you do. I haven't worked with cameras, key frames, and batch rendering in such a long time. One trick for setting up your camera is to go to ___ menu and click on Look Through Selected. By doing that you can look through the camera lens to see what fills up the screen.

Batch Render from Maya

I used batch render in Maya to export each frame out. I do this mostly to save time. It takes Maya a long time to render out a movie so we just export each frame as a jpeg. I exported these images into my project folder in the subfolder images. I keep them here so when I do things later, I won't encounter problems.

After Effects

I imported a jpeg sequence into Adobe After Effects. After Effects makes all the images in the folder a animation. This saves me the struggle of bringing every picture and then placeing them on the timeline to make it a cohesive video.
After watching the jpeg sequence on the composition I saw some flaws in my modeling. I went back to fixed them. I re rendered from Maya and then brought it back into After Effects as a new jpeg sequence. It's nice to be able see what I've started with and how I've fixed them.

Render settings in After Effects.

Then once I have everything situated in After Effects I can render out a mp4. This is really easy. I go to the render que and set the settings to the right thing and then tell After Effects where I want my movie to go to. Then I press the lovely Render button. Then I watch the movie to make sure it works and that it rendered right. I'm done and that's the end.