Welcome to this final lesson where we will cover how to render a sequence in this scene, I have animated
a camera called the Master Cam.
I've also animated the lights, which you can see by clicking on the light preview here.
You can kind of see them flicker on and off in this lesson.
I'm not going to get into how I animated this stuff.
You can watch the animation section of this course to learn about animation.
But in this one, I want to explain how to render entire sequence.
Up until this point, we've only been rendering Arnold previews from this Arnold render view preview
by hitting play up here.
And we see a single image.
But in the case of this scene, we have a animation and we need to render out this entire timeline.
So how do we do that?
Let's look at the render settings.
And I'm just going to leave this timeline here in the middle at the point where the lights actually
turn on.
And I'm going to go into the render settings and explain a few things.
So this is the render settings button up here and we get the window, which you might be a little familiar
with.
Now, we've opened it a few times and we want to make sure that we're on render using the Arnold render,
because that's all the shaders and everything we've been building with.
And the first thing we want to look at is everything on this common tab is kind of important.
So let's run through it.
Basically, we need to name the files so you can see the file name right now is just set to whatever
the scene name is up here.
And we can delete this and.
Right.
Click and say, you know, maybe the camera and these little tags will name it based on that.
And you can see when I d like that or hit enter, you can see it says perspective and so we can do our
own little tag and say skull.
A skull had lighting and then you could add a tag as well.
After that I was going to leave that for now and I'm going to enter so that it takes that change.
Now you see the file name is this.
But how so?
The whole reason why we're rendering out image sequences and not a movie file is because this 100 frames,
depending on your computer and you know the type of animation you're rendering and lighting and everything,
it could take days.
I've even had renters take weeks.
So let's say you take a week to render an entire sequence and one frame of that is messed up.
If you had rendered out a movie, which is a single file, you would have to re render that entire thing
or have to render out that one frame and then do all this editing stuff.
In the case of image sequences, you can just isolate the the frame number that you want or the chunk
of it and render out those frames.
If there's an artifact, if the renderer failed at some point and it's much easier, much better to
use image sequences.
And that's just the standard.
That's what everyone does.
So in the case of rendering an image sequence, you need to take these files, bring them in after effects
premiere, I believe, handle's image sequences as well, and then it will interpret the twenty four
frames a second, which is kind of the common thing set down over here that hey, this image sequence
frame, one to one hundred, which we can see here, is meant to be played back at twenty four frames
a second.
So every second there will be twenty four frames shown.
Right.
So this is one second one to twenty four and it after effects are premiere, you can look up how to
import an image sequence and then import these images into those programs and render out a movie, a
movie or whatever other kind of video file that you would like to have.
But when you're using 3D, you are dealing with image sequences.
So that's why we're choosing a file name for an image sequence.
To get this sequence out, we need to say frame animation extension is not a single frame.
We do not want a single frame.
We want multiple frames.
So we want named no extension.
So name means the file name we've put up here by no means the number of the frame down here in the timeline
because each one is going to be obviously unique and then the extension, meaning the image format that
we're choosing.
So when we click that, we can see it changes up here, the file name again.
And now we have the frame number and the extension of the image format we're choosing X are is a floating
point format, which can have multiple layers in it and very high dynamic range, sixteen or thirty
two.
But images, if none of that makes any sense, click jpeg and you don't have to worry about any of that.
That's an eight bit image and that's fine.
You're probably not gonna be doing a ton of, you know, high end compositing.
If you're new to Miah, if you're coming from a compositing background, then, you know, Albany was
already probably and you'll want to choose that one.
But if you're totally new, just choose JPEG.
And it's you're probably familiar with that with like taking pictures and stuff.
It's the same idea.
So now we need to tell the frame range so we can see down here in the timeline, it needs to be one
to one hundred and we need to choose the renewable camera is the wrong one right now.
We want the master cam, which is one that's animated, and then we can choose the dimensions that we
want it to be in.
And for me, I'm going to do seven 720.
And the larger it is, the longer each render is going to take.
And you can kind of preview how long each frame is going to take by using the older interview.
And when you hit play down here in the bottom left, it says rendering, but once it's done, it will
have a number here and that will be the timer.
Basically, it'll say this took a minute and twenty five seconds or something, so I'm just going to
leave that going.
So maybe we'll set here in a second.
So the next things we want to be concerned with are the sampling numbers in the Arnold Renderer tab.
This basically means quality, OK, and it divides it into different aspects of a render.
But the main one you want to concern yourself with is the camera one, because this is multiplied,
multiplies each one of these ones below it.
So it's kind of like a global setting.
So let's take a look at that now.
Now that we've have ORENDER done, we can see it took thirty five seconds, but we have all these Firefly's
and that's a term called for an artifact where there's basically all these kind of dots and it doesn't
look maybe terrible right now.
But keep in mind, this is going to be an animated sequence.
So these little dots here, which are I'm going to zoom in so you can see all these little dots in the
background, those are going to move every frame.
So it's going to look noisy as hell in an animated image sequence.
So we need to address this and the quickest way to address it.
But it might also be the most expensive for your render time, meaning your render time is going to
increase is to increase this camera settings.
So let's crank it up to something like six and see what happens.
And let me let me also just say let me crank that back down to two.
Let's use this crop region also goes a little quicker.
Let's just choose a region.
Let's when we choose something with a little bit of the skull on it as well, let's choose this region
and let that run.
So it's gone one second and it's done.
I click the little snapshot button down here and now we have this snapshot saved.
So when we make any changes, we can come back to it and compare and we can get off of it by clicking
the lie down here.
So now when we crank this up to six, we can compare it to with what we had earlier.
So now that took 13 seconds for this little region.
When I click another snapshot and I'm just going to click back and forth between these two and you can
see the difference by increasing the sampling, we're starting to get rid of those fireflies.
It's not perfect yet, but it did a great job pretty much.
And I think for our purposes, it's going to be good enough.
There's some other things we could get into the weeds a lot on this.
But as a as a general overview, you can increase the sample size here and it's going to help out a
lot.
If you want to evaluate this stuff further, look up light decay.
And this is basically happening because this object, the skull is so close to these lights that the
indirect light is creating all of these kind of specialty indirect bounces off of this object.
They're just too this is just so close to this object.
But that's not really for this course.
It's kind of an advanced topic.
So for our purposes, increasing the sample size helped a ton.
So now we can go to the render tab here.
We're under rendering.
And if we've set our project here, you can also see under the common tab that it should be having the
right file path.
Right.
This is what I set up to.
I set the Miah folder here as the project folder, so it's automatically finding the images folder in
there.
So that's also the part important part of setting up the project.
And just one more thing real quick.
I want to cover this other tab, Aoki's tab.
This is if you are in an advanced compositor and you're trying to learn 3D, this is basically the different
kind of render layers that Arnold uses.
So if you click built in, we have all these different aspects of a render and we can isolate them so
we can activate them.
So it'll be included in any exer because we're using JPEG.
It's not going to have anywhere to put them.
You have to have an extra selected for AV's to work, so.
Basically, let's choose diffuse indirect specular, and that's that's probably fine, and then if we
choose that at all or interview one more time.
And we get off of this snapshot view here and play.
Now, what we have if we go up here on top left, we actually have each one of these.
So these are basically passes that in compositing you can control each one of these elements of the
render and that specular pass actually looks pretty cool by itself.
But anyway, so if you're into compositing, you'll want to know about these things for our beginner
purposes.
Do not worry about it.
It's it's kind of advanced.
And, um, you probably won't need to do that stuff till later.
Basically, if if this render preview looks pretty good, that's all you need and that will get you
what you want out of the JPEG here.
OK, so we have all this stuff set, so I'm going to close that down.
We're happy with this, so I'm going to close this.
So I'm going to render and go to render sequence and open this up, make sure it has the master cam
double check.
It says the right frame range and you can also put an alternate output file.
Sometimes I'd like to select the images file as well just to be redundant.
And that definitely put it there.
Right.
So sometimes I'll do that.
And then when I render sequence and close, what was going to happen is it's going to start to go through
each one of the frames in this window.
So I won't be able to work in Maya from here on out until it's done, but it'll do it without a watermark.
If you use the batch render option, it will create a watermark, which I can't show you now because
it's already rendering.
But that's pretty much it.
That's how you render sequence in Maya.
And I really appreciate watching this course.
And congratulations that you've gotten this far.
And I hope to see in the next sections where we're going to cover a lot of cool stuff like reading in
animation and get into some more fun things.
So thanks for watching and I'll see in the next section.
All right.
Thanks.
Bye.