Have you made an animation and now you are not quite sure how to render it? What is rendering anyways? Rendering is the process of applying all of the elements of lighting, texturing, shadows, etc… to your scene. When you render out a movie, you render one image for every frame in your movie. So if you have a 5000 frame movie, you render 5000 images. These images are then compiled into a final movie format using SoftImage’s Flipbook. The purpose of this exercise is to discuss the process of rendering.
Once you have created an animation and applied all kinds of cool materials, textures, and lighting to your scene - you are ready to render. The first thing you need to do is to set up the camera view that will be used to view your final scene/movie. Unless you animate the camera, the camera view will remain stationary. For the purpose of this exercise, let’s use the default (stationary) camera provided in the scene. So to setup your render view, select the camera from the drop-down in one of your viewing windows and position the camera where you can see your entire scene. (You might want to play your animation and make sure that it is the final view that you want).
Now, you are ready to render but first let’s setup the render options (this is an important step). Go to the Render Module by using the 3 (or F3) shortcut key on your keyboard and select Render → Options, the Render dialog box appears. If you look under where it says Render Options there are a ton of different tabs that allow you to fine-tune the quality of the render but the main ones to be familiar with are the Output and Format tabs.
1. First under the output tab, you need to define the location and filename for all of your images. The default location to store your images is the Render Pictures folder under your main project folder. To change this, you can click on the (Browse button)next to the Image name box – make sure you name your final images. Notice that it puts a # sign after your image name. This means that it is going to name all of your images the designated file name and then number them sequentially. So in my example, I will have animation1.1, animation1.2, animation1.3 etc… all the way up to my final frame number (600).
2.This brings me to the next important step – setting your start and end frames. You can set your start and end frames simply by typing them into the numeric boxes to the right of “Start” and “End.” In this example, I have a 600 frame animation so my Start Frame # is 1 and my End Frame # is 600.
3. Next, you need to define your output omage format. The default format is SoftImage (.pic) – this is a fine one to use. However, if you would like to be able to view your images in another software such as Photoshop or Windows Explorer – you may wish you use a format that is universally recognized (such as JPG).
4. Now, go to the Format tab – this is where you set your Camera View and define your final output image resolution. Where it says Output Camera, select the camera that you used to set your final view. If it is the default camera, it will simply be called Camera.
5.For movies made for televistion, leave the Picture Standard and Picture Ratio options set to the default (NTSC with 1.333 ratio).
Finally define your final image resolution – this is the final screen size of your images and the resultant movie – 720x486 is the default. If you want to change this, first check the Maintain Picture Ratio option - this maintains the ratio of the image.
6. Now you can increase or decrease the Resolution X or Resolution Y values as you like – notice that when you change one value, the other changes appropriately.
7. Before you hit render, one other important step that I do is to “Enable the Jitter” under the Aliasing Tab – this is just a personal suggestion. Now to begin rendering, simply hit the Render button at the top of the box. It is good to3 not run any other processes on your computer while rendering is taking place. Good luck!