Subtitles of the Movie

Now one of the things that you'll want to do after you've set up your lights is take a look at a finished render, and the way this all works is that we're working in an interactive mode here, which is pretty fast to get around and it relies on the graphic card on your computer to display the image, but it does so pretty quickly, sometimes between 10, 50, 100 frames per second. A final quality render will actually be much longer, sometimes taking a few seconds per frame, up through an hour per frame. On feature films, it can a lot more than that even to create a single frame, because all of the lighting is calculated, and all of the surfaces are calculated very properly. In this case with the interactive view, you get a lot of what's called aliasing, or stair-stepping, along the edges and objects often look more faceted. The lighting itself is sort of a suggestion of the lighting, but not all that accurate. So right now, if I take my light and position it, it's more about here, I'm going to now look at a render by heading to Window, Rendering Editors, Render View. Here I can see a render I did previously. Let me hit the Redo Previous Render button, and this will now take a few seconds to calculate a finished quality render. So the first difference you can see between this and my interactive session screen is a bit more effort is made to clean up these diagonal lines and any circles or curves you have in the scene. The next benefit of the final renders are shadows. If I take this point light and open up the Attribute Editor by pressing Control A, and bring this over, and I head over to the shadows section of the light. Move this down a little bit so we can see, and once I've opened the shadows drop down, I see a depth map shadow attributes, and I'm going to turn on this check box for Use Depth Map Shadows. I'll go with the defaults for this. We'll talk about resolution in some of these settings in greater depth later, and now I can close the Attribute Editor. Okay. I'm going to redo the render and you can hit this Redo Render button up on the status line, or you can head back over to the Render View Window if you have that open. At this time it may take a little bit longer, so this time it's up from two seconds to three seconds, and I have a shadow. So let me get a nice view of this here from the side, and I'll re-render that. So I can see I'm casting a shadow here and I also have a somewhat anti-aliasing going on, but I do still see some of these jaggies, so I'd like to increase some of the render quality. And the way to do this is to open up the render settings, and I can open the render settings from this icon inside of the render view or by going to Window, Rendering Editors, Render settings. All right, in the Common tab, we have two tabs here; and the first tab, called Common Settings, we have a choice of the name of the image that will be output if we render to disk, and we will take a look at that in greater depth later. But the main one I'm going to take a look at here right now is the image size. So you can see here, if I want to render 320 by 240 pixels, 640 by 480, 2K square. If I'm going out to TV, you can choose CCIR 601, Quantel NTSC. So these are all some presets, or you're free to go in here and type in your own values if you know what size render you're looking for. I'll leave those alone and head to the Maya software tab, and I have a setting up here for the anti-aliasing quality that is a preset, and I'm going to choose Production Quality. When I choose that, it's going to increase some of the shading samples and anti-aliasing samples that are used, and that basically says how long and how hard will Maya try to make this look nice. So the higher number samples usually the slower the render but the nicer it'll look. So I've made that change. I'll close my render settings with the Close button down at the bottom, and before I render this next one, I'm going to save the current image so I have something to compare to. This Keep Image button here, the arrow pointing down to the box; press that. And now when I do the next render I'll have something I can flip back and forth between. So I'm going to re-render. Okay, again, I'll probably see the render time sheet up a bit. I'm up to six seconds from two seconds when I had no shadows, three seconds with shadows, and now six seconds with nice looking edges. And here I can flip back and forth between the previous render and the current render. And if you pay attention to this set of edges here, you should be able to see an improvement of quality. So I'll save that render there; it's a good habit to get into. And the last thing I want to take a look at is on the light itself, if I select my spot light and go to the Attribute Editor, right now it's casting the same amount of light across the scene, no matter how far away an object is, and this is pretty unrealistic. What I'd like to do is turn on a decay, and here I can see decay ray is set to none. I'll turn on a linear decay, and this means now I'm getting very localized light, which fades off pretty quickly to black. So as I turn up the decay or add decay, I now have to increase the intensity of the light. So with this set I'm going to re-render, and you can see now I have much greater realism as things close to the light source are bright, and as they get further away, there's an attenuation and they get darker. So now if I flip back and forth, you can see what a huge difference this decay makes.