The purpose of this post is highlight the animation process of showcasing the ten assets I had created in Maya and textured in Substance. This will document the process of the animation as well as the render settings and the process of making it into a video in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Animation
I basically started by making a cylinder polygon and scaling it down to act as the turntable for my assets to be placed on.
I proceeded to create a curve tool by going into Create > Curve Tools > CV Curve Tool to bring out a circle curve and place it above the turntable. This is where the camera will move along to capture the angles of the assets.
I then created a camera with aim and selected it along with the turntable and attached them by going into Constrain > Motion Paths > Attach To Motion Path to see if the camera was connected to the circular path. I may needed to adjust the camera so that the point of which it was facing didn’t end up being connected to the curve. After about a while, I had finally managed to have it attached, but with shoddy results as you see in the image below. This could clearly be done better, but it works as intended.
Now it was time to import the assets into the scene. I selected the cylinder light asset and its wall mount to be the first showcased asset. I brought up the orthographic side view and changed its perspective to the camera I’ve created. I also ensured the camera’s resolution was 1080 x 1080, so I turned Overscan and Resolution Gate on to prove it. This is what it should look like.
I also recently found out that you can modify the FPS here by changing it to the required 25/30 FPS, but I didn’t know about this at the time and I had to figure out if there was a way to do it in Premiere Pro. Luckily, there was a way, but that will be for later.
Now it’s about time I start animating the assets on the turntable. I started with the aforementioned cylinder light asset and gave it a screentime of about 3 to 4 seconds. I have calculated the amount of seconds with all of my assets and found the overall length to take over 30 seconds of footage, which is what I want. I played the animation, counting down the seconds it will take before I can place a keyframe for the asset to disappear. Now I will do the same for the Air Hockey Table and all of the other assets. Here is what the timeline looks like with the Vending Machine asset selected, the keyframes are outlined in red to determine the timestamp of its appearance in the animation.
And here is the same timeline but with the Roulette Table asset selected to determine its appearance in the animation.
Render Settings
Once the animation was complete, I ensured that I run through the animation and double check to see if every asset was displayed as it should and that the duration of the video was above 30 seconds long for the requirements. Once I was satisfied with the final result, I jumped into the render settings and hovered over the areas I wanted to change. First thing changed was how I wanted the image to be as, so I changed it to a png format. It wouldn’t make a massive difference had I gone with the Jpeg option either, though it would have been a faster render had I done so.
This is also massively important and I had to ensure I select the name_#.ext in the Frame/Animation drop down from single frame as I was going to be rendering multiple images from the animation
I also tweaked the frame padding so that the rendering would start at frame one and work its way up to the last frame.
Speaking of frames, I hovered down to the frame range and modified the end frames for the end frame on my animation, which was at 860 frames, over 30 seconds of footage. I ensured to also change how many frames will be rendered at once. Though it is optional, I chose to have each rendered frame jump by two. Looking back at it, I should’ve probably done one frame at a time, but I later found out a way to group it all together in Premiere. More on that later.
I also ensured I selected the renderable camera to that of the camera I was using for the animation so that the turntable would stay at the bottom displaying the ten assets. Another thing was changing the image quality to HD_1080 as I wanted this to be a high quality animation render and for it to look nicer upon looking back over the video. Once all that was set, I went into the Render Sequence settings and changed a few things, most notably changing the current camera to the animation camera again and selecting which file the images will be stored into. For the reason of staying consistent, I’ve set up a project folder specifically for the animation and created the project files in there. I wanted the images to be inside of the Images folder within the project file as you can see right here. Other than that, it was time to render the sequence.
Checking the Rendered Sequence Works
After about several hours, the rendering was complete. All of the images are stored in the folder where I wanted them to be, which is good. Now it’s time to compile them into an animation in Premiere Pro.
Just as a bonus, I wanted to see what the video would look like before it was compiled in Premiere, so I opened up FCheck and selected Open Animation in the files tab and searched for the image sequence. I only had to select the first image for the animation to play.
Premiere Pro
Now it’s time for me to jump into Premiere and start compiling the sequence together to make the 30 second animation. I attempted to import the image sequence into the timeline only to be greeted by a single still image that would take up roughly 30 seconds to 30 minutes. That didn’t look too great for me and so I had to find another alternative to how to go about doing this. I eventually found a way online on how to compile an image sequence a different way, and that is through nesting the footage. I selected all of the images and dumped them into the timeline. That’s great and all, but now the estimated video is over 30 minutes long and I didn’t want that, so I scaled the speed and duration of the video to somewhere about 34 seconds to meet the requirements of the task. The way I brought up the window was by dragging a box around all of the clips on the timeline and selecting Speed/Duration. What this meant was that the FPS will automatically change to 25, but I still wanted to make sure.
I then basically selected all of the clips and right clicked to bring up many options to which Nest was one of them. I named it to what it was and hit OK.
As you can see now, the clip is in a green colour, which indicates that the bunch of frames have been nested. Playing the clip reveals that the methods I’ve used are indeed working as intended.
Now I wanted to ensure that the clip is indeed set as 25 FPS to give the footage a 30 second worth watched animation video. I right clicked on the clip and selected Sequence > Sequence Settings. This brought up a window for me to modify the changes to my liking. I began by ensuring that the TimeBase was at 25, to which if it wasn’t, I would manually set it as that FPS.
I also had to change the aspect ratio of the video to 1080 x 1080 to keep the turntable centered in the clip. There is the option to do at the top of the sequence settings as well as in the video settings shown in the image here.
I didn’t think there was any more that needed to be changed in the sequence settings rather than the FPS and the resolution, so I left it as it is and checked the video to see if everything was okay. Once it was alright, I went straight to File > Export > Media and ensured I select the right format and preset to go with my animation. I went with a required H.264 format and a high bitrate preset for this.
I also ensured where the output location would be as, so I selected that and formatted the video to an MP4 and chose to save it in my network drive and giving it a suitable name. After that was done, I went ahead and backed up the new mp4 video on Box so in the event of a crash and all of the progress had been wiped, I would still have the animation on the Box storage. The overall video takes up about 20MB, a decent size for a high quality video.
I also created a new folder in the file explorer under documents and named it 3D Asset Animation for me to store the video in.
Evaluation
To give a sense at how long the rendering took, I started it at 10:00 on the 19th Jan and finished at 21:30. I was probably looking at about over 9 hours for the 30 second animation. The reason it took some long was because of the vending machine asset having way too many polygons, the asset taking around 2 hours just for the 3 – 4 seconds it was shown on screen. I also really could have done a better job at making sure what my options were, like using the render farm provided by the lecturers. In the end, I settled on something that would ease the pressure on learning how to properly set up the sequence with little to no trouble. The other problem is how I went about rendering each frame, as I had to done two frames at a time. This would cause issues when I was attempting to compile the images into a sequence in Premiere, as the clip would only bring out a single image with no animation built into it. Another thing is that if I had rendered the animation in 25 FPS instead of 24, the process would’ve been quicker than what it took. If I was able to do this again, I would have definitely gone for the options listed above. Those were the only issues I faced, as the rest were fairly straightforward and easy to do.
Regarding the added walls with the Cylinder Light and Flatscreen TV assets, I have decided to make that approach to put the emphasis on how the two assets would serve their purpose, showcasing its detail across the angles of which they are facing from. It would have been nice for me to detail the plain green walls, but I think the focus was on those assets to be fair.
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