The CG animation industry inherited a workflow from the film industry that consists of three broad stages: preproduction, production, and post production. In film, preproduction is the process in which the script and storyboards are written, costumes and sets are designed and built, actors are cast and rehearsed, the crew is hired, and the equipment is rented and set up. In the production phase, scenes are taped or filmed in the most efficient order. Post production (often simply called post) describes everything that happens afterward: The scenes are edited into a story; a musical score, sound effects, and additional dialogue are added; and visual effects may also be added. (In a film that has special effects or animation, the actual CG creation is usually completed in post production. However, it may start in the preproduction phases of the film or project.)
Although the work performed at each stage is radically different, this is a useful framework for understanding the process of creating CG as well.
Preproduction
Preproduction for a CG animation means gathering reference materials, motion tests, layout drawings, model sketches, and such together to make the actual CG production as straightforward as possible.
Because CG artists are responsible for defining their 3D scenes from the ground up, it’s essential to have a succinct plan of attack for a well-organized production. The more time spent planning and organizing for CG, the better. Whether you’re working on a small job or a complex film, entering into production without a good plan of attack will not only cause trouble, but also stunt the growth of your project.
In the real world, preproduction is part of every CG animation project. For the tutorial projects in this book, the sketches and other files supplied on the accompanying CD are your preproduction. Even for these tutorials, however, you should try to gather as much information as you can about the objects you’ll create, going beyond what is presented. Having different perspectives on a subject is the key to understanding it. Disappointing movies often are the product of terribly flawed preproduction stages; likewise, a poorly thought-out CG production will invariably end in headaches and wasted time.
The Script
To tell a story, CG or not, you should put it in words. A story doesn’t need to contain dialogue for it to benefit from a script. Even abstract animations benefit from a detailed explanation of timings and colors laid out in a treatment (because there is likely no dialogue). The script or treatment serves as the initial blueprint for the animation, a place where you lay out the all-important intent.
The Storyboard
A storyboard is a further definition of the script. Even a rudimentary storyboard with stick figures on notebook paper is useful to a production. You break the script into scenes, and then you break those scenes into shots. Next, you sketch out each shot in a panel of a storyboard. The panels are laid out in order according to the script to give a visual and linear explanation of the story. Storyboards are useful for planning camera angles (framing a shot), position of characters, lighting, mood, and so on.
The Conceptual Art
Conceptuals are the design elements that you may need for the CG production. Typically, characters are drawn into character sheets in three different neutral poses: from the front, from the side, and from an angle called a 3⁄4 view. You can also create color art for the various sets, props, and characters to better visualize the colors, textures, and lighting that will be needed. Props and sets are identified from the script and boards and then sketched out into model sheets. The better you visualize the conceptual art, the easier it will be to model, texture, and light everything in CG.
Production
Production begins when you start creating models from the boards, model sheets, and concept art. You model the characters, sets, and props, and then you assign textures (colors, patterns). The animators take the models and animate everything according to the boards and script. The sequences are rendered in low quality for dailies and checked for accuracy and content.
The CG production phase can involve a variety of steps. The specific steps are defined by the needs of the production. Most of the CG techniques you’ll learn in this book are part of the production phase. To make a long story short, 3D scenes are created, lit, and animated in the production phase.
Post Production
After all the scenes have been set up with props and characters and everything is animated, post production can begin. Post production for a CG project is similar to post production for a film. This is where all of a CG film’s elements are brought together and assembled into final form.
Rendering
Rendering is the process by which the computer calculates how everything in the scene should look and then displays it. As you’ll learn throughout this book, the decisions you make in creating the objects in a scene can make a big difference in how the rest of the process goes.
Rendering makes significant processing demands on your computer, usually requiring the full attention of your PC. This can take a considerable amount of time. You can render one scene while another scene is in production, but asking a computer that is rendering to multitask isn’t advisable unless you’re using a dual-processor machine with plenty of memory.
When everything is rendered properly, the final images are sorted, and the assembly of the CG project begins. Rendering is discussed more fully in Chapter 11, “Maya Rendering.”
We’ll take a quick look at three more post-production activities: compositing, editing, and adding sound. These are advanced topics, and complete coverage is beyond the scope of Introducing Maya 2011. However, a multitude of books are available on these topics for further study.
Compositing
Quite often, CG is rendered in different layers and segments, which need to be put back together. In a particular scene, for example, multiple characters interact. Each character is rendered separately from the others and from the backgrounds. They’re then put together in compositing, or the process of bringing together scene elements that were created separately to form the final scene. Maya makes this process easier with Render Layers, which you’ll experience in Chapter 11.
Compositing programs such as Maya Composite, Nuke, Digital Fusion, and After Effects allow you to compose CG elements together and give you some additional control over color, timing, and a host of other additions and alterations you can make to the images. Compositing can greatly affect the look of a CG project and can be an integral part of CG creation.
Many new animators try to generate their final images in a single rendering of their scene, but you don’t need to do that. Realizing the component nature of CG is important; you can use components to your advantage by rendering items separately and compositing them together in the finishing stage. This gives you a lot of control in finishing the images to your satisfaction without always having to go back, change the scene, and re-render it.
Editing
The rendered and composited CG footage is collected and edited together to conform to the script and boards. Some scenes are cut or are moved around to heighten the story. This is essentially the same process as film editing, with one big difference: the amount of footage used.
To make sure they have adequate coverage for all their scenes and to leave extra room for creativity in editing, live-action filmmakers shoot quite a bit more footage than is needed for a film. The editor and the director sift through all the scenes and arrange them to assemble the film in a way that works best with what they have shot and with the performances they prefer. A typical film uses a fraction of all the film or video that is shot.
Because creating CG is typically more time-consuming and expensive than shooting live action, scenes and shots are often tightly arranged in preproduction boards so not much effort is wasted. The entire production is edited with great care beforehand, and the scenes are built and animated to match the story, almost down to the frame. Consequently, the physical editing process consists mostly of assembling the scenes into the sequence of the story. This is also why a good preproduction process is important. When you plan out what you want to get, you’re much more likely to get it.
Sound
Sound design is critical to CG because viewers associate visuals with audio. A basic soundtrack can give a significant punch to a simple animation by helping to provide realism, mood, narrative, and so on, adding a greater impact to the CG.
Sound effects, such as footsteps, are inserted to match the action on the screen. This type of sound is also known in film as Foley sound. Music is scored and added to match the film. Quite often, the dialogue or musical score inspires a character’s actions or body language. Again, this is much the same procedure as in film, with one exception. In the event that a CG project requires dialogue, the dialogue must be recorded and edited before CG production can begin. Dialogue is a part of the preproduction phase as well as a component of post production. This is because animators need to hear the dialogue being spoken so they can coordinate the lip movements of the characters speaking, a process known as lip-synch.
How It All Works Together
The process behind making a South Park episode is a perfect workflow example. Although the show appears to be animated using paper cutouts, as was the original Christmas short, the actual production work is now done using Maya. In preproduction on a typical episode, the writers hammer out the script, and the voice talent records all the voices before the art department creates the visuals for the show. The script is storyboarded, and copies are distributed to all the animators and layout artists.
At the beginning of the production phase, each scene is set up with the proper backgrounds and characters in Maya and then handed off for lip-synch, which is the first step in the animation of the scene. The voices are digitized into computer files for lip-synch animators who animate the mouths of the characters. The lip-synched animation is then passed to character animators who use the storyboards and the soundtrack to animate the characters in the Maya scene.
The animation is then rendered to start the post, edited together following the boards, and then sent back to the sound department for any sound effects needed to round out the scene. The episode is assembled and then sent off on tape for broadcast.