3D Animation Layout Starter Guide

all right in this video I'm going to give a demonstration of various topics in just an entire process kind of getting started with your 3d layout animation so I'm not actually gonna be animating any doing any character animation or anything like that what I am gonna be doing is going from having nothing in created for my actual shots or scene files and go from there into setting up a Maya file for all of my shots in my animation and putting in a placeholder environment and props and all that other stuff so first of all before we continue I'm going to delete this which was just there for the thumbnail and I will just want to give a little recap here of what I have already so I do have a whole project folder made as you should already have to when you're doing this I did also create my character that I'm gonna put in so I have a character and I have a premade camera that I can just import in so I made a camera with an aim constraint on it already and I won't have to make that again and I also have my my main character not all the characters and so I've set my project and that's pretty much all I have so first things first before you start putting geometry and cameras in your scenes and saving them there's a few things we need to talk about so I've number one is that you need to make sure that you have a shot list this is just an example one that I made for something else but you want to make sure that you've gone through either your storyboards if it's something that you're making yourself or if it's something that's based off of another clip you want to go through both the storyboards and the video itself I seem to have closed my video without attention I have a little video that's a clip my gosh that was loud I have a little video here from Willow that is kind of my idea for my scene and so what I would have done is kind of broken it down so like okay shot one it's Val Kilmer hiding behind a barrel with arrows getting shot at doing shot to close up of these henchmen getting shot by Val Kilmer shot three close-up of Elko murder reloading and then throwing his crossbow away shot for a medium shot and so each one of these little moments where the camera changes is in my version of layout anyway going to be an entirely new Maya scene unless I make an executive decision to put multiple actions in the same shot so for example these two shots right here this one and this one could definitely be the same Maya file because all I'm really doing is moving from one camera to the next with the same action happening in both shots with these other shots it's not one continuous action you know this shot here is the direct continuation of the first shot there's been some time passing in between and you know Val Kilmer or just my main character in general will be in a different place behind the barrel and I could move him so again you know you have to decide what which shots are the same file in which shots are not the same file but the point is that you can't just blindly go in and start making your entire animation in one Maya scene without breaking it down first okay so there's that another thing that I did before I jump into this is I made myself a little map and I just drew this in Photoshop and this is based off of me looking over my video clip carefully and trying to place where what this set looks like by piecing together where things are in different parts of the of the animation so basically you know main characters behind this barrel I am guessing the barrels about this far away from the gate there's a gate that's about this wide and people can are fitting through it and there's an outside and then the dragon comes out of a little kind of a big puddle actually behind the main character and then he runs out the gate with the henchman and some of these other things are just kind of other features that are in the shot but aren't necessarily like they're not things that the characters interact with but they're good landmarks so there's this tower directly behind the dragon there's like these two pillars or Tower is right around the gate which I drew kind of probably those would be closer to the gate my drawing if I did it correctly you know I can see how wide the gate is because of how many people can fit through it at any given time so I'm gonna use that to kind of build a placeholder version of my environment because you know I don't have a separate environmental modeling department to make that for me I'm making it myself so first things first you don't want to import you know I'm starting with a new scene here and I don't want to import my main character because if I import my character I when I go back later to change it you know whether that's texturing and editing the shader or adjusting the rig I would have to re-import it and when you re in ports on thing it's completely brand new and none of the animation would stay on so what I'm going to do even this early in the process is I'm going to file I'm gonna say create reference and it's gonna look for my in my scenes folder and I'm gonna find the most recent version of my character now I'm gonna talk a little bit about something else related to this and keeping organized with this you know second but let's just do this for now if you're wondering why the student version came up twice it's actually because the bottle mesh is a reference to file into another file and that's where I rigged it and then so now I'm I'm by you know just by stacking references I'm technically referencing in two other files just the model and then the model with a rig on it anyway so we can go back after we're done here and see how I could update my reference later but for now we'll just put that in there and I'm also going to import my camera and this one I am gonna import because I doubt that I'm going to make any changes to the is the way that this camera is designed or I might even make a new camera entirely within the scene so I'm really just gonna import that one because unlike my character I don't plan on needing to swap it out with an updated version at a later time now it's not really gonna be possible to set up our scene unless we have some sort of environment so I'm going to just kind of make a very fast blocked environment here and keep in mind that I haven't actually saved this file yet but keep in mind that we want a reference in the environments as well so I'm gonna have to make the environment originally in some scene obviously and it might as well just be this one but after that we're gonna have to kind of say about the environment placeholder as a reference and then bring in that reference as the actual environment instead of the one that I built directly in here so let's just see what I'm talking about so if I look at my map which if I wanted to I could create a free image plane and load in that image not gonna lie I just accidentally clicked that one button the first try without attempting to and I'm holding down the J key in order to rotate this in increments of 15 degrees now it doesn't really matter but I do kind of want my environment to be set up how did you get backwards I do want my text to be on top that would be nice you should be 90 you should be nothing there we go um I do want my text to be the right way forward but if I look down at my compass you know Z should probably be in this direction and X should probably be this direction and obviously Y should be up so that's what I'm gonna do and if I want to get some good use out of this I might as well make it remotely the same scale and if I wanted to I could also technically go into my attribute editor and reduce the gain a little bit on that so that it's not as my eye melting and I will grab my my character here and rotate them forward just for posterity all right so I'm gonna make my placeholder environment and this is going to be very very basic for the time being anyway sometimes I like to go into the inputs to edit that rather than scaling but it seems as though I can only change those inputs up to 100 so scaling it is and remember this is a placeholder so I will be aware as I'm making this that some things will not be 100% accurate but I want to get those are those two things are exactly on top of each other right now which is not really what I want I can turn on x-ray mode there to see under there so I need a barrel that's an important feature why is that an important feature because it is a big landmark in several of my shots that my character is hiding behind so that is an important enough feature that it needs to be in the placeholder and I'm really going to go very very low detail with my environment for this I am kind of a stickler I mean I like to make things detailed when I can so I'll at least grab put in enough edges to kind of make this look like a barrel but even that is kind of unnecessary for this part of the process but it's easy enough so I'm gonna do it so I have barrel I do need to have some indication of the gate which is a very important feature of my animation since people are constantly running through it and I seed in the background a lot now again I may have to adjust actually how tall this gate is but I'm going to just kind of make what I think it looks like for now and it doesn't hurt to always be checking your a reference so I can see that it doesn't it is an arched gate and it is pretty thick so those are just some little observations you can make about your placeholders I don't know if I care too much about the arch but I mean I do for the final version but for this one I'm going to make a very basic archway and what I'm gonna do for that is just delete some edges in there and kind of just make it look like that and I don't you know I wouldn't even really need to bridge these but every time I say I'm not going to do something I do apparently so I'm going to bridge them beauty except for that part not you bye I don't care that I don't care about smoothing this right now so there's my gate you know I got in just a little bit if I want and I am going to just plop in a few more details here at least the things that I drew in my map because I bothered to jot them so I might as well put them in I'm just gonna have this thing kind of like here and this thing over here and I'll put another one in the back kind of like over here ish and make that one a little bit taller now for my little pond I'll probably just make a disc and I can do a little bit of stylizing on that to make it look more Pondi and I'll probably extrude my entire thing up which doesn't really make sense since its supposed to be a lake or a body of water but I'm gonna do it because I visually it makes it easier to spot and last but not least I might just put in that staircase that's over there which you can spot a few times in the movie clip so over here I must snap I'm a snap it and that's good enough for me all right so the idea here is that if I was gonna start laying out my shots now when I you know go to look in my camera which currently is below the ground I'm going to go to panels go to layouts and make this to paint side by side you can stay as that one and you can be perspectives and from my perspective view is where I will move my camera oh that's why it's inside the barrel the idea is that when I start lining up my shots I have enough information to actually know you know identify this as a scene so if I go back to shot one I could try copying this camera angle this is kind of a weird aspect ratio this actual footage this looks kind of like it is letterboxed but that's not that's neither here nor there um so I'd want to make sure that I I can get those camera angles before I start doing anything because if you're trying to line up the camera angles on a blank environment then you're gonna be you know you're not really gonna be making the right calls on things now once I have this placeholder environment in I don't even necessarily need to keep this in here so if I want to do I could delete this what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab everything that I just made and I am gonna delete the history on that stuff and probably freeze transforms to even though that it's kind of unnecessary in this constancy I am going to group these what is this poly cylinder Oh duh I forgot the barrel I'm just gonna grab everything from the outliner and I'm going to group them you know call this environment or I'll I'll completely misspelled it that could work too I replace holder and I'm going to file export selection and I'm going to export that as a my ASCII so this won't be exported out as its own ma file and I can put that into my scenes folder and call this environement placeholder apparently somebody outside is yelling right now interesting if you ever get this message that says that a file contains unknown nodes or data you can go to file optimize scene size and make sure that unknown nodes is turned on I believe that came up because my character was made when mentalray existed and now it no longer exists and it didn't like those nodes being on there maybe I'll spell it right it right this time ah there we go now this is gonna sound crazy but what I'm actually gonna do is I am going to delete that thing that I just spent all that time modeling after I saved out the other file of course and the reason that I deleted that is because I want to now immediately bring it back in to my scene but this time being referenced from that that file that we just exported so if I go to file create reference and bring in that there it is again except now it's a reference so when I make if I want to make the actual model of this rather than the placeholder version I can do all those changes in the other file overwrite the old file and then bring in all this new updated environment will appear in every single one of my files in which it is a reference speaking of which now that you have at least this much done in you to start your layout what you're probably going to want to do is just kind of go through and save out a bunch of separate Maya scenes so I'm gonna say command s here and I'm gonna say I want to save this as shot oh one oh and I'm gonna use that naming convention because if I need to add in like up in between shop I could make this a 1 5 and it would still be before Oh shot shot - OH - OH but I'll name that oh oh no vo 1 dot ma and hit save as I'm getting on if you if you get a lot of those messages you can just hold them in turn and they won't go away as we will see in a second because now this is gonna sound a little odd but what I'm gonna do is I'm actually just gonna want to keep saving as and normally I'd hit the hotkey except apparently um that actually he closes my screen recording software if I hit command shift s not gonna do that and this one will be shot too um I just told you to hold that under and then I forgot to do it um this one would be shot three and I'm not really I'm not gonna literally go through you want to do that but now if we go back to our scenes folder we will have a one version of all of our shots saved and the idea is that once you had one you know you make them all and they all have the character in them they all have the environment referenced in and they all have a camera and after that you go back and you start setting up the individual camera and any rough animation for that shot and you don't have to erase any animation because your first instinct may be just work on shot one and then save as that and should save it as a version two except now in version two you're gonna have to delete all the animation and camera stuff that you just didn't shot one this way they're all basically starting from the same starting point which is this so hopefully that makes sense now I'm gonna take a second and talk about referencing so I kind of I've made a few errors when I was referencing then I was conscious about at the time but I didn't I didn't explain them and there's there two things that are really did one is that I am putting all my scenes in into my scenes folder without organizing them and you know I don't have any props so I'm gonna have to model props and I may make you like an updated version of my character and that's gonna go in here and then all the versions of my shots so my scenes folder is going to become extremely cluttered and unorganized very soon if I don't address this early on so you can actually you do have the freedom to make folders within your default project folders so what here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna make a full are called references make a folder called animation and I'm gonna make a folder called edits or maybe I'll call this like assets again these aren't you know I'm not saying copy these names exactly but what I'm gonna do is first of all I'm going to close this scene because you shouldn't move files around while they are open that's bad so I'm going to put environment placeholder into assets I'm gonna put these into animation I'm going to put these also into assets and I'll put camera in there too so nothing is currently in references and we'll see why animation hears this and within that I can say shot a one-shot Oh 203 etc and put those in there so you can do you're allowed to do this because as long as you are putting everything within the project folder that has this same workspace dot M yell Mel folder or sorry file this is what's going to remind Maya where everything is so as long as you set your project and you're always staying within the same project folder then even if you put things into custom solve the folders it will still remember where they are whenever you go to a new computer or whatever as long as you set your project before you open them so why did I make this references folder that has nothing in it so the reason for that is because I don't actually want a reference in like my environment or my character rig directly I kind of want to make a copy of each one of these and we'll see why I want to go I want to open my rigged character and I'm gonna save this as and I'm gonna put this one in the references folder and I'm gonna call this a spray bottle ref or reference or whatever you want to call it and I'm just gonna save it and I'm not going to give it a version number or anything it's just gonna be ref and I'm also gonna do the same or a similar thing with my environment and I'm gonna save this as and this one will be called environment ref and the idea here is that every time I make updates to my model of my character or of my environment those can still have their own incremental versions but every time I reach a a new version of those that I want to bring into my or scenes I will overwrite the reference file and Maya will automatically load that in and now we can see why so if I go back and I open something I had before like shot one it's not gonna know where things are so reference file not found so it's still looking for spray bottle rigged version three so that's because I put things into subfolders and until I tell it where those are at least once it's not going to automatically find them so tell it where that is and then it seems like it oh it actually I only had to tell it where one file was and then it seemed to be able to find the environment as well which is pretty cool I'm going to file and reference editor and you'll see if you click on any of these references that it all it's all it's looking for is the path the file path of where this item actually is and it's looking for this specific filename so if I had this referenced in and in I then later went to make a spray bottle rigged vo4 I would have to manually go into every single shot and replace version three with version four and again that could mess up my animation it could delete my animation because it's considering it a new item that's bringing they're being brought in and it's just a little odds a lot of stuff to have my scene about word wise so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to replace this reference with the reference version and now it's looking for the model and I'm going to replace this one with the reference version as well and now all I have to do anytime I make any updates to my environment or my character or any props that I have would be to overwrite this file and I don't have to worry about replacing the file with a newer version in every single one of my scenes and you know I could have upwards of like twenty or thirty scenes depending on how much stuff is my clip so it's you know you want to keep your edit files separate from the one that's being brought into your scenes basically is what I'm getting at here okay so in terms of layout you know I'm not going to go too much over that but if we look at you know I showed this example if you're in my class so we really just want to focus on cameras and composition for the layout the animation can be very very very sloppy and to play basically the animation can be considered too placeholder as well just like some of the assets are and of course this is from a professional grade movie and you can see how simplistic their their assets are until they get past the layout stage as well as the animation so just doesn't you know I'll do maybe like one shot it has an example let me bring back my my preferred setup here so for shot one if I look back at my clip which I keep accidentally closing because I get trigger-happy with closing programs so you even just shot one it's just that it's once basically one second long and it's just the camera is completely still and it's the character going from a downward position and going up into a forward-facing position and if we look at the composition you know there's about this much space and this much space on either side of this barrel so that's what I can try and copy with my scene and by the way you don't have to use the camera with aim setup for every shot if you just I I just did that because I think it's kind of fun but not every shot needs to have that type of camera at the bottom of this barrel cut off so I want to marry that as well and one thing is that I may have to increase or decrease my focal length so this actually looks a pretty high focal length because the everything seems a pretty flat like this background seems like a pretty flat perspective rather than an exaggerated perspective actually a lot of this movie seems to be shot with pretty high focal length so the default focal length is if I go on my camera the default focal length is 35 so I might want to push this up to like 15 and I'll have to pull it back then but that may be you know if you're if you can't seem to get your camera angle right it may be not just that you don't have it in the right position but it might also be that you don't have the right focal length for the type of shot and I might and I'm making some adjustments to this barrel just in this there's one shot so this isn't gonna apply to all my references but we will have to keep that in mind again because this is just a placeholder so when I make the real environment I can make it I'll know what size it needs to be because I've already used this as an experiment and in terms of it and so my camera is not moving so I don't have to animate the camera but in terms of animation you know my character starts turned down like this and he it doesn't matter what my like weight painting and stuff looks like below the object because I'm not going to see it so I can make my guy get all weird looking behind this barrel and this only needs to be 24 frames I typed that in the wrong one it's only needs to be like 24 frames because as we saw the shot is only like one second or thereabouts so I could put a keyframe on here that's just basically like whoosh no I don't forgot that I move this one so I actually would have wanted to move that one first always moved from the core upward or outward and I don't have a prop so I brought I should have made a placeholder version of that prop as well before I started doing this but I still have the ability it's not like once I start I can't make the placeholder prop and save that out as a reference and everything as well so that's literally all I'm going to do for this shot in terms of layout pretty much if I want it to be really fancy with it I could maybe at least put like an arc a little bit more of an arc on this or like a little bit of an overlap just for funsies that's it all right and you know I I could go back in and put these arrows flying in but I'm oh I want to kind of crank out this whole thing pretty quickly so I am going to you know save this and move on to shot too before I do any extra work because I'm mostly concerned with getting the basic gist of the shot put in place and then I am about getting every little detail so I would recommend going through blocking out each shot or laying out each shot and putting in as many placeholder things as you need and then maybe doing like a second pass if you have the time and that beat were like you know where I put in some you know just some cubes or cylinders representing these arrows and of course that prop that I'm missing so yeah and you know everything in here would be a placeholder until I make the real version like I have with my current character in there all right and then at the end you would want to save out a play blast for each shot so you that'd be basically one play blast per Maya file unless you are putting more than one shot in the same Maya file which as I said earlier you are allowed to do if you decide it's wise so I'd save that right here and use the best settings that you feel fit make sure you put the scale of it one make it high quality and both dupe I do want to actually turn off my resolution gate when I do that and I would go and put that in After Effects or premiere or whatever you happen to be using to edit your thing together now in terms of I'm gonna pause this for a second and in terms of putting in your audio track for you're putting in your audio track for your scene I am going to show you how to do that real quick although I just thought of it I had it prepared earlier but I'm gonna pause my video for a second and we all jump back in once I open the correct software what does the hotkey for okay so we're back here what I did is I opened Adobe Media encoder if you don't have that or you don't have access to it you don't have to use that you could do this in After Effects but this is gonna be a little bit straight more straightforward so I'm just gonna open up and add a source to my cue and I'm gonna bring in my movie clip mmm and really all I need to do here is change my type of export to something like a mp3 or a WAV file dot wathah and I can put that and I can save this into my sound folder and technically I've already made a clip there but and I don't really need to care too much about the settings but it's literally all I have to do I can just change that and render it as a waveform or an mp3 and it already finished in half second so meanwhile back in now I'm also I have After Effects open here I have brought in that playblast I made earlier and I don't have more than one shot made yet but if we pretend that you brought in all of your play blasts from your layout after you make them and pretend that all of these are not duplicates of the same movie clip in that they are in fact two different playlists if I put them all in order I can just then right click on select them all and right click and say came from assistant sequence of lit layers and that will put them all in order with no gaps between you don't use After Effects you don't have to for this but that's what I'm just going to do and I can also import my wav file and bring that in to be my audio track and now so you don't want to include any audio in your play blasts you want to put in the audio in your editing file because there's plenty of things that can go wrong with putting audio in the play blasts and sometimes it doesn't even work and also you want it to be continuous in the edit file you don't want it to you know you don't want to have weird choppiness or gaps in between from having the audio embedded in the various play blasts now speaking of which one last thing for this video as far as I can think of is that now that I've saved out my audio clip I can also use it for something else which is I can put my audio into my Maya file in order to more accurately time out my layout so if I just import and I go to my sound folder I can bring in sorry that that's kind of loud but now I can actually timeout my my audio and that's what I mean by don't save this out in the play blast so make sure that the play blast doesn't have the sound in it if you want to find your sound file first of all you can go and just right click in here and say sound and then select the clip and make sure that that's that's selected and then you'll actually see the waveform but if you were to click the options you can also go over here and do stuff like unit put an offset so it wouldn't start until a certain frame changed that you know replace the clip do yadda yadda yadda but that is going to make your life a lot easier as well so actually maybe there are no options about saving out the sound let's see okay so the sound does the sound does appear in the play blast by default which is a little annoying but we could just check this to off before you say about your play blast either that or if you forget to turn the sound off before you play blast you could also just mute all of the layers in here by toggling off this speaker icon so there's multiple ways of doing it anyway that is about it for this a little recap here of setting up your layout and getting your clip ready to use that's that's pretty much gonna wrap it up for this video it's already kind of long so I if anybody has any questions feel free to email me otherwise that's gonna be it for now all right good luck

Channel: Ross Reagan

Views: 10,066

Keywords: Maya, Autodesk Maya, 3D, 3D Layout, Layout Animation, Animation Layout, Animation Tutorial, Layout Tutorial, Beginner Tutorial, Maya Tutorial, 3D Animation, CGI Animation, Animation, Maya Animation, PreProduction, Pre-production, Shot planning

Id: Tcx4bb__68Q

Length: 45min 22sec (2722 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 24 2018