The Preproduction Process: Planning

Every smooth operation begins with a good plan. The more research and focused information you gather, the better off you’ll be in your work. For this exercise, you need to find out where each of the planets is in relation to the Sun and to the other planets and also how many moons it has.

Starting with the Sun in the center, the planets in order are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. (We’ll label Pluto a planet for old time’s sake, even though it was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” by the scientific community in 2006.) All these planets actually orbit the Sun in ellipses, but we’ll give them circular orbits for this exercise. Most planets have a number of moons that orbit them, and one, Saturn, has large rings that circle around it.

Creating and animating all those objects may seem overwhelming, but it’s a great way to become comfortable with Maya and animation. Because the goal of the project is achievable without making every moon, you’ll cut most of them out of your scene and make a maximum of two moons per planet.

You can redo this exercise in more detail when you feel more comfortable with Maya. For instance, if, after you’ve worked through the exercises in this book, you feel like creating a much more accurate Solar System with beautifully textured planets and a perfect starry backdrop, go for it! It will still be a good idea to set up and animate the scene carefully, just as you did (or should have done) the first time you worked on this exercise.

The more you run this exercise, the clearer Maya’s scene manipulation and hierarchy structure will become to you. Art is a marriage of inspiration, hard work, and practice.