Setting up a scene animation to allow adjustments later on (Maya).

pr1970

Hey all

Ive started doing animation work for rendering and just wondering how people generally setup a scene for various cameras,lights,etc

For example my scene has 7 cameras and 1000frames, i've setup frae 0-200 camera 1 , then 201-300 camera 2,etc. Lights,materials and objects and all animating. 
Now say i want to add a few more seconds to camera 1, but also adjust the keyframes for everything to cover those extra seconds. I'm having to adjust everything in the scene and bump it along frames to accommodate.

Whats a better way of doing this? Any advice? 

Thanks

Eric Chadwick

I would make each shot a separate scene file, reference the meshes into it, then do the animation local in each camera file. Rather than having to slide keys around and manage a multi-shot setup all in one scene file. 

pr1970

Thanks, yeah was thinking the same after I posted. Have the lighting as a scene, then each mesh set and then just reference them in. Then can batch render the shots.

Nixellion

Yeah, that's how I would usually do it as well. However sometimes it's easier to work in a single scene, depending on the style of animation, and approach to it. For example if you're working with mocap, and approaching the animation more from perspective of a cinematographer (I have motion in the world, and I'm filming it as is, not animating every shot individually), then one approach could be to have a single camera that jumps between frames. But that commonly causes motion blur artefacts (if you render motion blur or motion vectors) when the camera jumps from one spot to another. Also sometimes managing multiple scenes can take more work than it's worth really, when all you need is change the camera angle.

You could likely write a simple custom batch script to render everything, defining which frames should be rendered from which camera. So it would handle stepping through frames and selecting the appropriate camera for each frame\range. Pretty sure you could write one with AI nowadays, but if you need help with one I can try making something like that.

Also - look around, maybe such a script already exists and is available somewhere.