Subtitles of the Movie

Maya is essentially setup to make the animators life as easy as possible. The best example of how this is true is in the case of character technical direction. Character technical direction is setup so that when a character is put together, the character technical director turns a mathematical system into an unbreakable toy, which has any number of controls associated with it that cause the character to do certain things. And example of one of these control interfaces is the animation editor, the blend shape editor. Now we don't have any blend shapes here, but blend shape targets are facial poses. And the character technical director works to develop the facial poses, but then creates an interface that the animator can very easily understand and operate. So the animator is essentially setup to work with an unbreakable toy and the job of the animator is to create curves essentially - you create keyframes, key poses. And again one of the beauties of Maya is that it will draw the in-betweens for you. In many production pipelines the technical direction is accomplished and obviously the modeling has to be accomplished in the beginning. Modeling is done, then technical direction and then after all the character technical direction is accomplished, then the animators come in and do their work. So animation tends to be at least within the world of Maya, the final place within a production pipeline - so we thought that we’d describe just a few ways that labor is divided, and few ways that Maya is broken up into jobs. That is to say artists; some artists work in Maya and never touch the rendering interface, they work exclusively in dynamics. An individual trying to create an individual project will have to work in all areas, and develop some level of expertise about all of the modules. But in the field, keep aware that in large production pipelines tasks tend to be broken down in the fashion that we described here.