Finishing Off The Environment

To completely finish off the environment, I wanted to animate a video panning through it that would completely showcase everything I'd made. This doesn't mean only the individual props, but I wanted to include shots that would show the entire scene in the way I wanted to show it.

Having a basic idea of the things I wanted to include and the wide shots I wanted in the animation (such as the one below) I began researching ways to animate the camera.

Animating a camera in Maya is very similar to that of After Effects. As I have a lot of experience with After Effects, the transition itself was not all that difficult. Within Maya, setting up a camera is very easy as once the camera is set, it can become the primary viewport and animated from there. The image below shows the view from the camera.

Having this freedom allowed me to pick all the shots I wanted with ease, from the wide open shots to the very small and intricate ones.

One of the most important shots I wanted to include was the one of the drain and grate I created earlier on. As it was a rather prominent feature of my concept work, I felt it needed time in the animation to show what it had become. I decided to use it as the final prop shot before the final overview at the end of the animation for this purpose.

From the drain shot we pan out to here. I felt this was the best shot to end on as it really shows the scene as a whole and gives the viewer a very definite end after going through the entire environment.

Working with the interface itself to create the animation is very similar to After Effects. As the viewport becomes the camera, setting keyframes (red lines in the time slider) becomes very easy. Using the "S" key to set a new one on the timeline (shown at the bottom) they can be moved very easily. Because of this, animating the entire scene became one of the easiest and most enjoyable parts of this creative process.

The red bounding boxes on the right hand side show a keyed transformation. Maya does have it's own "autokey" feature where it will key the scene for you, but wanting to do everything in the scene myself, I opted to go for the manual method.

After exporting the entire sequence out as images, I was able to combine them in Premiere Pro and export them as a video. This process was very easy as it just meant importing the images into Premiere as their exported sequence.

My final environment submission is shown in this video below;

After around 4 weeks solid working with 3D objects, 3 hours exporting from Maya and another 2 from Premiere Pro I think I can finally say I have finished my environment.