How To Render High Quality Video in Maya (Basic)

hey guys it's monica at academic phoenix plus and welcome to another tutorial in this video we are going to cover how to render out an animation so in this video we have this basic turntable and i am looking at turntable camera so if you don't see this white outline you can just activate it up here and it's called your resolution gate so activate that and this will show you your resolution so this is what you are going to render anything inside the space anything outside of this space it will not be rendered so notice that this is probably going to cut off the bottom of my base and that's okay because the main focus is after all the character if you guys are doing animations you might want to turn on the what's called action safe and title safe so action safe just means that anything between this green line and the edge of this film gate it might get cut off depending on what type of television so it's important that you make sure that your main action is not inside this space and i'm going to turn off title save as long as the action remains inside this space you should be okay this one is in case you have actual text for example you might have a 3d logo or something really important or your name for example um you want to make sure that it is in title safe that means that no matter what television you're watching this in it could be your grandmother's super old television or it could be in a movie screen or it could be in the gym televisions that seem to crop everything it will always be safe this is called title save so you want to make sure that your logo your name or anything like that remains in this space so now that you understand these options i'm going to turn them off let's go ahead and render so up here at the top with this little clapper and a gear it's called the render settings let's open that up and you're going to notice that we are using the arnold renderer and we're going to start with the common tab the first part you want to take a look at is the file output what is this name going to be called now right now it is named after my project which is like female character turn and i spelled table wrong so termed tabak what i want to do is actually call it something else so this will be female turn table so if you have your project set correctly which you hopefully you have take a look at the path the images are going to be rendered in images so i might have some random things in my images and i don't want to add more what i want maya to do is create a folder called turntable and then inside that folder it will have all of my renders that will keep everything really nice and organized so over here i'm going to type in turntable and then i'm going to use a slash and i'm sorry i don't know if it's forward slash or backslash but it's kind of going from left to right bottom top sorry i don't know which one it is i should look that up image format i'm going to change this into tiff now you can keep it exr but i don't really have any render layers or anything happening so this is just a tiff and tiff keeps transparencies which is what i want and my compression is none take a look up here and you'll notice that the file name is now called turntable slash female turntable perfect and next i need to tell it this is an animation right now it's only going to render one scene so under frame animation i want to make sure i choose name number extension now you'll notice that it shows turntable female turntable.001.tiff and then after that it's the same information except it says 0 1 0 which is 10 dot tiff i'm trying to tell it that i wanted to render between 1 and in this case it's 10 which i'm going to change but that means that it's going to be animated now be careful one of the biggest mistakes i see is people choose the one below which is name extension number and that doesn't really work so uh there's no extension called zero zero one so just double check to make sure that name number extension is correct this is one of the biggest mistakes i've seen new students make so just double check to make sure that is correct because you will have to either rename the every single image or you will have to re-render and both of them take a lot of valuable time all right let's go scroll down go to frame range and now we have start which is one and then it's up to you where the end frame is this is a 180 frame animation so i'm going to type in 180. i'm going to keep scrolling down under renderable cameras this is in case you are not rendering from perspective i actually am going to be rendering in my turntable camera so i'm going to choose that and by the way you can watch the video tutorial on how to create a turntable in a previous tutorial take a look so again i'm choosing here and i'm going to choose perspective whoops sorry turntable i'm going to scroll down and this is my preset my preset means that i have decided that the render is hd 540. now if you open this up you're gonna notice that there's a lot of other stuff in here if you're interested in making like a letter which is a 300 dpi uh there's a whole bunch of ranges but you might 540 is actually relatively small so let's compare here's 540 and i'm gonna render one right now this is considered hd 540. now let's go ahead and take a look at what it looks like if i choose 720. this is hd 720 notice how much it fills up the the screen this is very important for you to understand that the bigger the resolution the longer the render will take however the higher the quality and it will look great when you bring it up into let's say a television your hd screen depending on what you have so hd 540 has a tendency to be the default because it's small but remember you need to increase your render size so that you can get a really nice quality render let's take a look at 1080. so again i'm gonna go over to here render settings hd 1080 and i'll be right back this is what hd 1080 looks like it can't even fit on my screen because well it probably goes from on one edge of my monitor to another and that's great because that's what i want i want it to be a really large render for this example i'm actually going to keep it at hd 540 just to show you how to quickly render but you have to consider for your projects which one do you want is it is it like just an example then i would do hd540 is it for maybe a project that you need to turn in 720 is probably a good bet is this something for your portfolio that's going to be displayed in youtube or some social like it's really important for it to be viewed and high quality then hd 1080 is the way to go i would highly recommend that if you're going to be publishing some sort of animation like an actual legit animation you stick to hd 1080 in the least so if i scroll down on the quality i actually kept every single one of them this is what it would look like if i took an hd 540 and stretched it out to be 1080. that is very low quality you don't want that if i click on one one this is what it actually looks like if i go over here to 1080 and i click one one this is what it looks like also take a look at the render time it increases exponentially this is 26 seconds which is not bad uh the one with hd 720 took 11 seconds and 542 took seven seconds so it's not bad at all um just keep that in mind when you're rendering so you can kind of calculate how long it's going to take all right so now that we talked about image size i'm going to take it back to 540 again this is more of a preview and i think that's it for this thing by the way if you guys are interested in print so some people may be asking like hey i really want a really nice render for print you need to make sure that your resolution is higher than 72 72 is perfect for screen because you never zoom in so you don't lose quality but if you are going to render for like a magazine or anything in print you need to change the resolution to 300. this is kind of like graphic design 101. okay so now we did comment let's go to arnold arnold is about the quality of the render if i take a look at my render and again i'm going to go back to my the one that took seven seconds i'm gonna click one one if there's noise that are reducing the quality of your render you need to go in here and crank up the settings right now it's only taking seven seconds to render but that's just the default settings if you want to increase your render i would increase this camera aa to four which is just the sample sizes increase and also all of these guys which is the color specularity um i do have a little bit of transmission because of this ball i don't oh yeah i think i have subsurface i'm putting a subsurface and i don't have any fog so i'm going to keep it at that i'm also going to open up adaptive sampling and enable it 20 is a lot i'm gonna drop it to maybe six so what's gonna happen is that it's gonna bounce back between four and six so let's say that it that arnold recognizes that this little cube right here um has a lot of you know contact shadows diffuse settings you know all sorts of stuff it's going to spend more time there and sample it six times instead of four so keep that in mind that again it's going to increase your render time but the quality is going to be significantly better so now that i have these now don't go too crazy some people actually go all the way up it's not gonna help you can go probably up to five and then four four four but eventually you're going to increase all these settings and it doesn't do anything so you're wasting time and you're not being efficient so just make sure that you keep tabs of your settings all of these we're not really going to need because they're much more advanced but these are the two basic tabs that you need to look at i don't want a background so as you can see there's this gradient right here i don't want that background i'm going to open up the attributes i'm going to scroll down and go into my visibility and change it to zero so that's not going to change anything for the lighting but it is going to make this look like it is not there so let me show you what i mean if i click on this this is the alpha if i go back to rgb and you'll notice that the alpha is white that means that if i bring this into photoshop or any type of compositing software it will be solid but if i render all right i pause and now i'm back you'll notice that the background is clear if i click on the rgb you'll notice that there's a cutout so that means i can replace the background with anything that i want go back to rgb and if i compare the render you'll notice that nothing has changed in the lighting the only things that's changed is just that the background is now black that's it so it's pretty sweet and that's what i want i want that transparency so again when you look at your render settings you want to make sure this is a tiff if you change it into a jpeg it will not have transparency so tiffs pngs whichever you like just make sure that you do not use jpeg all right we are set the next thing we want to do is save so file save as we already tested it out to make sure everything looks good um everything looks good on my end and we are ready to go so over here at the top left let's go to rendering and we are going to go to render render sequence go to the options again double check to make sure you are in the correct camera make sure it helps if you look over here to make sure you're in the correct camera as well and then i'm going to click on render sequence and close this is going to slow down my computer like crazy so i am going to press pause and i will see you in a second tip number one do not just walk away double check to make sure that your render is actually rendering through the right camera so just kind of keep an eye on your renders tip number two double check to make sure in your images folder that it's rendering correctly and it's placing it there correctly here i am in my images i'm going to go to my turntable and you'll see that my female turntable is actually working so here's uh here's frame number one frame number two and frame number three still working so it's important that you make sure that everything's looking good before you walk away and let it render if it's not working right and every maybe it's looking at a different camera just go ahead and press escape that will stop the render fix whatever you need to fix and then start again it will replace the images when you render sequence again that was my two tips and i will be right back and there we go we have one to 180 frames so i just want to let you know that it took a little while each of these frames are about 40 seconds with 180 frames you can calculate a little bit of how long it's gonna take but just to let you know i went and i paused the video i made dinner i cleaned everything up and i came back and it was still rendering so as you can imagine it does take some time to render so make sure that you give yourself plenty of time to render your stuff so that you can have a completed project okay so how do we take these images i'm going to double click here keyboard key to move it to the right so you can see that it's looking good i'm going to use what's called encoder you can use after effects on premiere whatever you like but encoder will work just fine looks like this so the way it works is that i'm going to click on this little plus sign but i'm going to copy this so select that control c go back into encoder click on this little plus sign and i'm going to go to my turntable and click on that first frame going to tell you do you want to tiff image file sequence yes and then click open so you'll see here that it will say female turn table 1 through 180 and it's a tiff the default is h264 which is perfect the match source is medium bitrate which it work if you guys want a high quality render then you need to go to high bitrate i'm going to click on this guy right here which is telling me where am i going to place this video i am going to place it in my 3d projects uh my female character and there is a section for movies so i'm going to go ahead and call it female turntable just get rid of all these random numbers and then click save and then hit play it's going to show you a preview here the background is black so there's nothing there there's no text or anything to describe it which if you want all of that stuff you would have to go into after effects but this should work for just to see your movie when i click again on this link which will open up the location double click and there she is now remember this is you can see that she's a little blurry right and that's because this is h.264 and i've extended it all the way to match my screen so let me go ahead and make it smaller and there you go now this is something important for you guys to note notice that it says 29.97 frames per second remember that the animation that we did was actually 24 frames per second so 29.97 is usually for uh video but if you have accurate animation or you want something specific then you need to go ahead and make sure that this renders at 24 frames per second so i will show you how to do that when i click on this little plus sign i'm going to again click on the first one this time i have to go to my match high source click on that and over here we have something called the frame rate go ahead and turn that check mark off and then you're going to change this to 24. i'm also going to turn off audio because it doesn't require any audio click ok and then once again i'm going to drop it off in my movies and i'm going to say this is 24 frames per second press play let it do its thing here is my movie and now this is the actual accurate frame rate and you can see at the bottom it says 24 and there you go you can see that the animation's going on over here on the little sphere that she's got she's got the base everything's rendered well the quality is doing well and you have now a rendered image so hopefully that was helpful uh let me know if you guys have any questions or comments by leaving a message below i'm always interested to hear what you think if you think this video was helpful and interesting please go ahead and like and subscribe that would be amazing that really encourages me to make more videos like these and take a look at academicphoenixplus.com that's where you can find my free downloads free e-books free trainings and so much more so take a look at academicphoenixplus.com and if you have time subscribe to my newsletter if this has been helpful please tag me in your social media i would love to see your turntable uh i am in twitter and also in instagram so feel free to uh tag me i would love to see your work so thank you again for watching and i will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 14,306

Rating: 4.9408865 out of 5

Keywords: render, video, how to, video tutorial, maya 2020, autodesk maya, images, rendering, high quality, animation, 3d, cg, lighting, texturing, render sequence, basic, fundamental, intro, adobe, media encoder, arnold

Id: 8ht_Gp6P9DY

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021