Actually, I'm skipping a big step here. You need to make all those models. But there are tons of modeling tutorials out there. If you haven't done them all, you're probably not to this point yet.
In theater terms, this is called "blocking". Using your models, set up each scene. All your models and effects don't have to be done. Explosions can just be expanding spheres or wireframes at this point, all the rocks can look the same, furniture made out of cubes, etc. You don't need to animate the characters yet. Just figure their relative positions and motion into and/or out of the scene.
It looks like a stick puppet show at this point. But it lets you get a good idea of camera and lighting angles. And an idea of how much set needs to be dressed. (Knowing how much set there will be is a big deal in Hollywood productions, because it determines how many set dressing people you assign to each scene. Yes, even CGI films have a set dressing department.)
Don't worry too much about texturing at this stage. Just use some default colors. You will likely be rendering each scene several (perhaps many) times to refine the camera angles, lighting, and stage positions. You can't afford day long render times at this step.
The lighting is still just a rough estimate. Pay attention to camera angles because the perspective determines alot in the animation phase. There's no sense in spending the time to animate a charcater's hand motion, if the hand ends up off screen.
Just like you did with the story reel, piece it together and watch it. Have those whose opinions you trust watch it. (Don't show it to naysayers, though, because it does look a little silly at this point - characters sliding around, not bending their arms, etc.)
Get all the comments you can at this point. When we move into animation, it becomes very hard to make changes even with little things like camera angles. Make those changes now.
Ok, now the hard part.
Effective animation is one of the hardest parts of CGI. This is why we did so much leg work prior to reaching this stage. Once a scene is animated, it is escentially 'set in stone'.
But since the camera angles are locked in, feel free to use perspective tricks to make it 'look right' with less work. As the ship builders say, "better fair than square".
(Along these notes, if you've seen Toy Story 2, the rocks in the opening sequence weren't supposed to be hanging in mid air. They got dragged there by mistake in one of the layout reels, but it looked so cool, they kept it.)
I'm not going into lengthy details on animation, there are tutes for that too, and it depends greatly on your story.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is you may need to slightly adjust the scene length in final editing. Start each scene slightly before each expected cut point. Let each scene run a little long. It's an easy way to give some flexibility in the final edit. If render time is too precious, don't render those frames, but have them ready to render. This way if you're panning across a set, and you need to add 20 frames to sync with a sound effect, you don't have to go back and dress the additional parts of the set that wasn't seen before, or worse, try to shift all the IPO's exactly 20 frames forward because you now need to start on frame -19.
You still have one more pass to make. Once the animation is done, final lighting/effects get added, but we'll probably want one more rev on the old test reels. Put it all together, review. This should very close to how you want the final to look but without all the visual punch (and probably at a lower res).
Now every scene should be locked down. Now is the time you get everything ready for final render at hi-res with full lighting and effects. Why didn't you just do this before? Well, shading time increases linearly with the number on lights (with the square of the number of lights in raytracing) and with the sqauare of the height or width. So if you render a test at 1/2 size, with 1/2 the lights it's done in 1/8 the time. And if you're going to film, (typically rendered at about 2000x1250 pixels or so), you can get by with 1/4 res and still have better quality than a typical VHS VCR can record. That's a small price to pay to have one last chance to fix things.
So now we spice up the scenes, add effects like env. mapping. and do our final render. As a traditional editor, you're job would just be starting. But as a CGI editor, it's almost done (as far as the visuals are concerned). There should be very little to do but piece the scenes end to end, and look for rendering defects.
Mr. Salter told us a little tale about how all the animators were so "up" and cheery when the visuals were 'in the can'. They wondered why he wasn't sharing their enthusiasm now that we were finished. He replied, "Well, there's a whole crew of people you haven't even met out at the Skywalker Ranch (home of the THX sound studios). We still have about 3 months of work to do."
This is in fact the final step. The visuals are pretty well synced to the scratch soundtrack, So ideally, you just re-make the scratch with the final sound and effects. But of course, anyone who has watched a looped B-Movie (where the sound is recorded in a studio after all the film is shot) will know this doesn't work exactly. Get it as close as you can, but remember how we planned each scene to give a little before and after? Well, use those frames now to make a perfect fit. Add a frame here and there, repeat a few. . .
Congradulations Mr. Producer, it's a wrap. [back] [Tutes Page] [Home]