Animating How A Product Works

[R-B]

I have never rendered an actual animation in Maya but have played around with the key or timer. For a side project I have to animate how a device opens, operates, etc. I was wondering if you guys can share some tips for a beginner. What is the best way to approach something like this? How should I go about rendering the scene, HDRI etc. I will appreciate any piece of advise anyone thinks might be helpful for a beginner like me.

[danlefeb]

Well, you'd have to give more information if you want more assistance. For example, this "device" you're talking about could be a DVD case in which case it could be as simple as rotating one of the sides to open - or it could be an automobile in which case its not quite as simple to "operate".

As far as the look, that all depends on what you want. For most of my previs-type stuff I've found that a simple ambient occlusion or final gather does the trick and can get a nice clean look. On the other hand, I don't have the need to fully texture every single project I work on so once again it all depends on what you're doing. Using my examples before, a DVD case can be as simple as texturing the cover and a label or something and for something that simple even the Maya software renderer can handle it. But for a car, you'd probably want the reflections and all the details, so you'd want HDRI or something. Give us a little more detail on what you want to achieve and we can help out.

[R-B]

The device I plan on animating is a computer device resembling a PDA. It's a little large and will have a slid on the side for CDs. The will be buttons arranged just like on most PDA's. The is to animate it to show what each button does, etc.

[moonie]

I think this guy is just looking for a simple way to render a scene.

If you want to render a maya scene go to the render globals and chose AVI (the easiet) and choose multiframe above it. then go to render > batch render. I would recomend you to render with maya software, but if you want a really nice result, render with mental ray with final gather on and som other stuff (though you would have to render it as a lot of single frames and then put them together, and you would probably look for a relative fast way to render your scene, because it sounds like it will be quite long). Remember to set the start and end frame, and choose a cam or the persp.

[moonie]

...And take the liberty to post a picture. I would like to see your gadget :cool: