Transcripts
1. Course Overview: Hi welcome to this [inaudible] sized Maya class. My name is Lucas Ridley, I'll be your instructor. I've been a professional animator for the last 10 years. In this class we're going to create an animated Mobius strip. The course is around 30 minutes long, it's short enough that you could do during your lunch break. Just download a free version of Maya, if you don't already have Maya, you can get a free trial version for 30 days from Auto desk's website and follow along. I also include the project files. If you get stuck, you can ask me questions or you can open up the project files and take a look at what exactly I made during the course. You don't need any 3D or Maya experience to take the course. Everything is very direct and to the point, and we only use the tools that we need. It's a good start course to dip your toe in the water of 3D and using Maya. This class will take you from model ling to animating two lighting and rendering. From start to finish, I'll show you how to create this cool render and how to customize it to make it your own. You'll have enough information to tweak a few things and make it unique for your own artwork. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in class.
2. Navigation & Project: Welcome to the first lesson of this course. Let's get started by opening up Maya for the first time and get working. Here we see the Maya interface. If it doesn't look like this for you, you can go to "Windows", "Workspaces", and choose the "Maya Classic", and choose "Reset 'Maya Classic' to Factory Default" if you haven't already. This is the "Outliner", you might not see this. It's this little button over here on the bottom left, or you can go to "Windows", "Outliner", and that is basically just the table of contents of what's in our scene. We don't have anything in our scene right now, so I'm just going to click the sphere from the poly modeling tool shelf, and that creates a sphere. I can hit F to zoom in on it. Then, to navigate around the view port in Maya, I can hold down Alt, and the left mouse button will orbit around, the middle mouse button will pan around, and the right mouse button will zoom in and out. That's why we need a three-button mouse. We are working in three dimensions, so the three buttons on the mouse represent each one of those ways to navigate around. Now, the one thing we want to make sure we do before we get started on the project is to set the project folder. I'm going to go to "File", "Set Project", and I'm going to select the directory of a folder that I want to save all of this in. I'm going to click "Set" and then say "Create default workspace". I'm going to go back to "File", go to "Project Window", and just accept all of these default file locations. It's going to create all of these file folders in the folder that we just selected. It's going to create this whole directory of folders. Most of these are going to be empty, we're not going to use most of them. But it's just the standard way that Maya wants to put in textures in this folder, put in renders in this folder, put in assets, put in sound. It just creates all these different folders to keep your project organized. I'm going to hit "Accept" and then I can delete this by clicking it and hitting "Delete". Then in the next lesson, we're going to get started by creating the animation. I'll see you there.
3. Modeling: Now, let's model what we're going to actually animate in the lesson after this. I'm going to move pretty quickly, so if you're new to Maya, this might feel a little fast. You going to always stop, rewind, re-watch, or ask a question, I can help you out there. Let's create a cube. There's a couple of ways we can do that. We can go to the poly modeling tool shelf and hit this cube here. We could also go to Create and go to Primitives, and choose a cube here. Now, whether or not you have Interactive Creation on or off, gives you the ability to draw out where you want the cube to be created and how high the cube is. I have that off because I just want the default cube in the center of the world, so that's where it's going to put it when I hit that button. Now, we can access a lot of different attributes from the Inputs category in the channel box. If the channel box isn't open, you can select it from this far right tab menu here and open it there. It's also available with this top right button, right here. From the Inputs, I can just hit poly cube 1, and that will drop down all of these options that are available to us. What I want to do is increase the height to 10, then I'll increase the subdivisions as well of the height to maybe 50. Then we can increase the subdivisions in the other by just a few just to give us a little more geometry to work with. Then all we need to do is go to the modeling menu here, which this gives you access to different types of menus on the top. This will just change the menu items up here. We can go to Form and go down to Nonlinear, and I'm just going to tear this off for a second. I want to create a twist on this, so I'm going to click "Twist," and then I'm going to click the cube again and hit "Bend." I've created two deformers on the same piece of geometry, and we haven't done anything yet to either deformer. On the bend handle, I'm going to make sure that the bend inputs are open and go to Curvature here, and just middle mouse drag in the viewport will increase that value. You could also click the value area and type it in, but I like to click the attribute itself and then I can middle mouse drag in the viewport. I want to increase that all the way to 180, so we now we have this doughnut shape. When I go to the Twist handle, now I can go to the inputs of this drop it down, and increase the start angle. What we're looking for is essentially a 90 degree turn here. You can choose to go more or less depending on what effect you want your Mobius strip to have, but I'm also want to turn off the grid here just for a moment, so it's a little less distracting. There's a bunch of options up here that I'm not going to go through every one, but turning on and off the grid is this one. We could also turn on anti-aliasing just for the viewport. It's not going to affect the render just so we get a little bit crisper view and our viewport it's easier to see. Now, we've essentially created the main part of our animation, and now in the next lesson, we'll actually animate it. This is basically the modeling portion done. See you in the next lesson.
4. Animation: Now let's animate what we've modeled here. I'm going to close the non-linear deformer window because we don't need that anymore. I want to select the twist handle from the outliner and go over to the twist inputs and drop down those attributes we're familiar with now. I'm going to Shift-select start and end angle, so that they can be selected together at the same time. If I middle mouse drag now in the viewport, we can see that they move together in this psychedelic looping fashion. I'm going to undo that just to get back to the original values of 90 and zero. What I want to do is right-click on these and set a keyframe, go to key selected. Now I want to left-click and drag in the timeline to go to Frame 120. I can change these values and I will need to keyframe them again. Even though we have auto key-frame on is a button down here. I think it's off by default, so you might have to click that on if you want to auto key-frame something, which means any keyed value, if you change it, it will remember that and create a new key if you're on some frame that doesn't have a key yet. That's not true for the attributes that we're messing with. We actually need to manually create those keys. I'm going to select both of those start and end angle, then middle mouse drag in the viewport to 360 on the end angle. Because I know it started at zero and I want to go around one time, which is 360 degrees. Once I get close, I can see what the math is for adding 360 to 90, so I don't have to do that in my head. Then I can just round these up or round them to whatever their closest to, 360 and 450 or what we're needing. But you can notice that it's a lighter shade of red. That means that value is key framed just not on the frame that we're on right now. We want to make sure we do set that key frame on both of these. I'm going to Shift-select both of them, and I'm going to right-click and choose key selected. Now we get that darker shade of red and we get the red tick in the timeline that shows us it is indeed keyframed. If I hit "Alt V" or I can hit the play button right right I will play the timeline and we can watch the animation playback. If we notice it looping, which you want to have this icon here showing the loop symbol, if you click it once, it'll just loop once, or will ping pong back and forth. As you click that button, it'll toggle through those options. We want the loop one because we want to see this loop. If we're watching this, we can notice that it slows down and speeds back up. That's because the tangent handles of the animation curves are set to auto, and we can visualize that by opening up the graph editor. Let's hit "Escape" to stop playing back and go to Windows, animation editors, Graph Editor. That will open up a new window, and If we hit A on the keyboard, it will frame all for the graph editor, and we can make this bigger if we want. Now we can see the value change over time. That's all a Graph Editor is. It looks really complicated. All it's saying is over time, which is what I'm doing now. I'm going through time, this value changes from here to there. That's all that's telling us. The curve itself is saying how it's interpreted between those two values. We can see that the change over time starts slow. That's why it slows down. Then it speeds up. That's why it speeds in our viewport, and then it slows down again. That's how we're visualizing. Why is this speeding up and slowing down? It's because the tangent handles are auto tangent, I should say. If I select both of those keyframes by just click dragging, I can actually access the other interpolation methods instead of auto, which you can see we're on right here. I can go to linear and that will straighten out the tangents of the curves. I'm just going to move this to my other window here so that we can scrub the timeline and now watch as I hit "Alt V" to play back. We can see that this should loop seamlessly and not speed up or slow down. We can't tell when is the start and end frame because everything is constant. That's how you can make a looping animation work and not catch your eye of telling when the start and end of something is. If it's all moving at the same speed constantly, you can't tell where that loop point is. Now, we have animated are mobius strip, in the next lesson, we're going to take this a little bit further and I'm going to show you how to customize this to make it more your own. Thanks for watching.
5. Customize: There's essentially three ways we can customize this further; One is customize the animation more, two is to customize the model more, and three is to customize the materials and shading and we're going to cover that in a later episode. Now we're just going to focus on adding a little more animation or adding more modeling to this subject. What we could do for animation is just keep doing what we've already done. Add more deformers and animate them in a looping fashion. If I select the geometry, I can keep adding deformers so if I go to the Deform menu, go down to Nonlinear and choose Sine. I can add a sine deformer and we can see all of the attributes over here, under Inputs, what we have access to, nothing's changed as soon as we apply that deformer because we are at an amplitude of zero. As soon as I click that and middle mouse drag that, we can see that that begins to affect the model. If I want to middle-mouse drag and not have it move such a huge value, I can actually change that rate of change by going up to this speedometer icon and clicking it a few times to get to the low change influence setting. Now when I middle-mouse drag, it will change a lot slower and it's easier to fine-tune what these values are when that is chosen. Now the amplitude let's say at 0.2, I can just animate the offset. Let's go to Frame 1 and let's choose to right-click that offset and go to Key Selected and then same thing that we did last time. We can also just leave it here. This is a modeling thing to do as well. We can just leave that and just choose different shapes instead of it being a circle. It's a modeling thing as well if you just don't want to animate another deformer. That's one option. If we wanted to animate this, we just do what we've already done. Go to the End key frame after we've already set the zero key frame and then we can just middle-mouse drag in the viewport to something like two which will loop the animation. If I type in 2, right-click, choose Key Selected again, and now I hit "Play", we can see that that will add more animation in a looping fashion. We'll distort and deform the model that we already have and keep going. Again, we want to make sure that we're doing linear tangents on this so that it doesn't slow down and speed up unless that's what you're going for. But it's not what I'm going for. Instead of opening up the graph editor again, what I can do is double-click on the timeline. It will select all the keys in the timeline by displaying this red view here, I can right-click and go to Tangents. Then I can choose Linear. It will loop just like the other deformers we have looping. That's one way we can keep adding animation. The second way is to add more to the modeling, maybe some more details, and add more geometry. One really fun way to do motion graphics in Maya is with the MASH network. It used to be a plugin by another company that was bought by Maya and now they've integrated MASH Maya out of the box. What we can do to make sure that MASH is loaded, you go to Windows, Settings and Preferences, go to Plug-in Manager, and then we can scroll down to where we see MASH. MASH is in its own category right here. My head might be covering that a little bit and then we just make sure that Loaded and Auto loaded is on and that will make sure that we have access to it in our menu up here. If I go to the drop-down menu and go to Animation, half of this menu changes. I get a new set of options here. One of those is MASH. I can click that and create a MASH Network from this, but we want to make sure that we have the geometry selected first. This is essentially going to be our source mesh and we need to choose what kind of geometry, what we want to pepper all over this mesh and so you can choose whatever you want. If you right-click this, you actually get other options here. We could choose a Helix, Gear, Wheel. What I'm going to go for is just another sphere because it's very simple and easy and I'm going to just scale that down a little bit by typing in 0.2 in the transforms over here. I just chose all of these and typed to 0.2. It's hidden because it's within that geometry now, that's okay. But with that selected either from our outliner or select it in the Viewport, we can go to MASH and create a MASH network. Any menu option that has this little box means there's more options for that command. If we select that, we actually get a new Window that shows us all those options. What we want to do is Instancer because that means it's going to instance that original piece of geometry, that sphere over this mesh. We don't want to create a new mesh. That just means that's more taxing on the software basically in your computer. By instancing it, it makes the scene a lot lighter and easier to work with. I'm going to choose Instancer and hit "Apply" and "Close". Now we see we have a bunch of duplicated spheres out here going in a line. Hey, what's that about? That's because MASH just has to choose some value and that's the one it shows a default linear distribution of about 10 items. If we go into the Attribute Editor, we get access to all of these options here. It's this little button up here on the top right. I can see that there's two tabs here: MASH1 and MASH1 Distribute. Every MASH node that you create will have a Distribute option here. Let's go over to that and we can immediately see that's why we have 10 balls in a linear distribution fashion and each one at a distance of 20, or the whole thing is a distance of 20, I should say. We can already see what kind of effect we can have with this tool and we can tell also that this isn't the distribution type we want. We want to pepper all of these items over our geometry that we have right here. I'm going to go to Distribution Type and I want to choose Mesh. That gives us new options that we can put this input mesh into this section here. I'm going to middle-mouse drag this original cube here from the outliner to right here. If I left-mouse click anything, I'm going to lose that menu so don't left-mouse click because you'll just have to go back. Let me just show you what I mean by that. If I select this from the outliner because that's what I want to drag over as the input mesh, I lose that, and now it's showing me all the attributes for the thing I just selected. I don't want to do that. I want to go back to the MASH network by clicking it here and making sure we're back on MASH1 Distribute and now we have this input mesh connection and I'm going to middle-mouse click and drag, holding down the middle mouse and then let go over input mesh, this Not area right here. When I let go, it inputs that as the input mesh so it knows to distribute that sphere over that mesh. We can see we have this cool little added detail to the mesh and you can go crazy with this because there's all different kinds of methods you can use to drop down this menu. We can say, hey, only put it on every vertex and if we crank up the number of points, we can pepper them all over it. Even though the slider only goes to 100, we can type in whatever number that we want and it will go to that distance and also change the range here. Now we can see we can go all the way around and have a sphere on every single vertex of this geometry. I can just keep increasing until it covers the whole thing. Now we have a totally different kind of a view and style. We can put cubes all over this. We can put whatever kind of mesh that we want into this system and use the mesh that we've created as the source mesh. There's all different kinds of stuff you can do. MASH is a huge network. I discussed how to create a DNA strand in my medical animation course, how to create some chromosomes. In the Maya for beginners, huge course, I discussed how you could use this to pepper graphs over the ground of your environment in a scene that you're animating. MASH is very versatile. There's a lot to do with it and it could be its own course by itself. I just wanted to scratch the surface and show you how you can quickly and easily create something pretty unique just by adjusting a few of the settings. If you go to the MASH1 Network tab rather, you can see that there's a whole slew of other things that we could add to this network and if we go to MASH, we can go to the MASH Editor and visualize in its own type of outliner what we've done. Right now we've only used the Distribute, which is default. Everything needs to be distributed in some form or fashion, so that one will always be there. We could add more offsets, we could do add a signal. Anytime I select this by left-clicking, it'll say added, and as soon as I added, it will add another tab to this list we have up here. Now we have MASH1, MASH1 distribute, and now we have Signal. We also have time because the signal node is dependent on a time node and you can see it doesn't show up here. Sometimes MASH is a bit finicky. We can just reopen that MASH Editor and now we can see the signal node is in there. We can turn on and off those extra nodes by just turning on and off the radio button here. We could also turn on and off the entire MASH network if we wanted to and just see where we're going and play with different things. I'm going to leave that to you to explore a little bit further. I just want to scratch the surface just that so that we can show, hey, let's customize this thing a little bit more and there's many different directions you could take this and get creative with how you want to customize this. As a quick aside, if you're messing around with some different variations and you're running into trouble around where the two ends connect of the bend handle, then you need to go in and delete the two faces here on the inside. That's easily done by just selecting the Geometry, right-clicking going to Face, and then just selecting each one and hitting "Delete" on the keyboard and that should resolve a lot of problems where maybe some things aren't matching up as you'd like them to. Or if you have a transparent material applied, then we can just turn the bend handle back on to 180 and have that connected back up, and everything will distribute nicely along this polygon. Thanks for watching this lesson. I hope you take this idea and run with it and do a lot of experimenting on your own and see what kind of creative solutions you can come up with to create your own customized bolt Mobius strip. In the next lesson, we're going to get started with the materials, shading, lighting, and rendering. I'll see you there.
6. Shaders, Light, & Render: Now let's customize this with lights, shaders, and get this rendered. The first thing we want to do is set the render image. We want to make a render camera. I'm going to go to Panels, Perspective, New. Then now we can see the bottom it says perspective one. We also have perspective one selected here, so I can tell that I am in that new camera view as I navigate around. Now I want this to be pretty straight on. A good way to do that is by turning on some of these gate options here. If I select this one, I get the resolution square. Then if I select the one right next to it, I get this grid so that I can roughly get this to be in the center of the frame. Now that's my render cam. I want to make sure that I lock that down. I can actually just select all of these transform attributes right here and right-click and choose Lock Selected. Now, I won't be able to move that camera view anymore by accident. The next thing we want to do, we could just turn some of these off if we wanted to. I'm going to leave that film gate on. Now we need to add light to our scene so that we can see this render. If you don't have the Mtoa plug-in loaded, you won't have this Arnold option here under the rendering tab. You want to go to Windows, setting preferences, Plug-in manager, and go down to the Mtoa plug-in and make sure that that's loaded. It should be loaded by default, but just in case for those few people that it isn't, that's where it is. Let's go to Arnold and add a light. Let's go lights, sky dome light. Now, a sky dome light is essentially a 360 degrees sphere that we're inside of now. What we want to do is map our HDRI image to that's and that image of a real life set place in the world will light our scene. That's what helps add realism to our renders, that this object will actually be able to reflect a photo image off of itself so it adds that little nice detail to the reflections. I'm going to switch over to the attribute editor with the sky dome light selected and I get all of these attributes. Where we want to pipe in that image is the color attribute. Now, before I click this checker box here, I got my HDRI from polyhaven.com. It used to be called hdrihaven.com, but now they've changed the name to polyhaven.com where you can find free HDRIs and you can see the sphere previews as well, what it will look like when you use that to light your scene. I'm going to click the checkerboard here next to color. We'll get this window and we want to choose File. Now, depending on what you have on the left side will affect what's in the right side. If that's messed up, just choose 2D Textures and choose File. Now we can click the folder icon next to image name to navigate to where our.exr file is. If you've set your project correctly, you should already be in the source images folder. That's where Maya likes to keep all of its textures and images that the project is using. I'm going to select my.exr file here you You see a preview of what it's like. It was one of the studio lighting setups that they have. I'm going to open that. Now we can see a preview of it in the background. I'm going to go to the Arnold tab and open up the Arnold render view so that we can see what the finished item is going to be. I'm going to hit Play on this button here so we can get a real life view of that in real time. Now, if I don't like the rotation of the sky dome, I can actually select it and rotate it around. We can see how that affects the render itself. To rotate something, I'm going to hit E on the keyboard and then rotate it around. Now we can see it update in real time in the render view there. We can rotate this around to whatever view that we like best. Now, let's add some shaders to our object by selecting it, right-clicking, and going down to assign new material. That will open up a new window and we want to go to the Arnold shaders because we're using the Arnold renderer. Now, the standard surface is, as it says, it's standard material that everyone uses 99 percent of the time so I'm going to choose that. You can see, I don't really know where the attributes are here. There's a lot of tabs now. We've got all the deformers in here, all that good stuff. What we can do is click this little arrow and go to the right and we can find the AI standard surface one. I'm going to select that and then I see all the attributes for this material. Each one is a bit self-explanatory. Specular means specular. Highlights, transmission as subsurface coaching. It can get very complicated. For the nature of this course, I just want to cover the basics and leverage the presets that Maya gives you. I'm going to choose a preset by clicking the Presets button and you can see all of these different presets they give you and they'll change all of those complicated attributes for you. If you want to do something basic like a plastic shader, they have that for you there. I've found that the bubble shader for this is a cool effect. This is another way to customize this, go through and try each one of these and see what you like the most. For the bubble shader, I want to make sure I replace a 100 percent of it. I don't want to go through and check one of these and start to blend other shaders together, I want to make sure it's 100 percent a bubble and then I can adjust it from there. You can see the effect we're getting on the renderer there. I want to adjust this slightly. Now it's not really having the effect that I want it to have right now, so there's a couple of things I want to do. One, I want to get rid of this background. I don't want to see the HDRI image in my render. So I'm going to select the sky dome and I'm going to go down to the visibility and change cameras to zero. Now all we're seeing is the object itself. I'm going to select that object, it's a little hard because now it's a bit transparent. I'm going to toggle back over to the surface shader that we have. I'm going to increase the metalness, just so that we're getting a bit more reflection, I'm going to increase the weight as well. Now we're getting the weight of the color which wasn't acting on it at all earlier. Now if I scrub the timeline, we can see how it's reflecting the environment that we had displayed on it and it's also reflecting itself and all of those little balls self-reflecting off itself. Now the reflections right now are very sharp and it's a bit distracting. So I want to reduce those by going down and go to the specular tab here and just increase the roughness. As we increase the roughness, that basically literally means the roughness of the surface. The reflections aren't going to appear as sharp as they had. Now, depending on your machine, you might not be able to scrub through your timeline like this and you may have to pause, move the timeline, and then re-initiate the render by hitting the Play button again. It all depends on the hardware specifications of your computer, whether or not you can do this reliably without Maya crashing very much. But so that's one way to do it. Then the other shader that we want to apply is to the balls themselves. I'm going to choose the sphere which is now hidden. Mash hides whatever object you're using mash for, it hides the original by default. That's why it's a bit grayed out here. If I wanted to unhide it, I can hit Shift H to unhide it. But just with it selected now I can go in and just right-click anywhere and say add new material the same way we did before. Go to Arnold Shader, Standard Surface, and now I can get to the AI standard surface two tab, it's labeled two because this is our second standard surface material. I'm going to go back to the presets and choose something like a copper or a gold to make this pop a little bit. Maybe I'll try copper. That is essentially it. Now we need to render out this animation as an image sequence. To do that, we need to go to the Render Settings. I'm going to turn off the render preview for now, so it's not running, and I'm going to go to the Render Settings behind having the clapper board with the gear wheel here. We'll get a new window so that we can adjust our render settings. You may have to choose Arnold render here for render using and then we have all these settings. We want to say what name we want to give each one of our files. I'm going to call this Mobius one because I might do a bunch of variations and so I want to just call it by a number, so I'll call it Mobius one. Now I want to make sure that I have the ability to export a range. If we go down to frame range, we can see it's actually grayed out. That's because for the frame slash animation extension or EXT, we have a single frame chosen. We don't want to export just a single frame. You could, but I want to do an animation. So I want name,.number,.extension. That number means the frame number. Every image that it exports will give the frame number that it was. I want it to choose frame one to frame a 120. Because that's the extent of our timeline down here. Now we have that selected. Don't forget we have a render cam. I should have renamed it to render cam because this is the moment where it's easy to see which camera it is. But for argument's sake, I'm a bit lazy right now, I'm just going to leave it up for its default names, call it perspective one. Now, this is where you can choose presets or the dimensions of what you want to do. Right now, it's really a one-to-one example. If you want to increase, double the size of the dimensions, it's going to double the render time. You want to keep in mind how long these renders take because you could be waiting days really, if you do like a 4K version of this. For right now, I'm just going to choose HD720 and go to the Arnold Render tab. The main sample value you want to adjust is the camera samples. That basically is a multiplier for all of these other complicated sounding things. If you just increased camera samples if there's a lot of noise in your image, camera samples is going to get rid of most of those. The other way you can get rid of noise, depending on which version of Arnold you're using, has a denoiser under images. We could add a denoiser, they have two options. I believe the noise is more intended for the final render and optics is more intended for the render preview that we're watching. So if you have a lot of noise in your image, this is one way to try to get rid of it as well. It's a post-process that happens after it renders an image. It will internally do a de-noising on it. Those are essentially the main things you need to worry about. Then we can basically hit Render. Because that we have set our project, we know where the path is, it's going to be in our project settings. Again, it's important to set your project like we did at the beginning of the course. We can see the path for this render is going to be my project that I set at the beginning in the Images folder. So that's where we can go find them. To render it, let's go up to the rendering tab, make sure that's set to rendering. Then go to the render menu, go down to render sequence and click the option box, just so that we can double-check that the current camera is set to perspective one and the alternate output file location is also set to the exact same images folder that our project directory is in. That way we can just make sure there's no hiccups in rendering this. We can click Render the sequence and close and we'll get this render view pop up and it'll go through each frame of the animation and render out an individual frame, image. We'll take all of those a 120 images for all those a 120 frames in After Effects and make one movie file once this is complete. Now that our render is done, let's open up After Effects and go to New Project. Right-click on the project window, Import File, and then we can choose the files that we've exported. We just need to select one and it should recognize it as an image sequence here. We can import, and we can see that everything has been brought in from frame one to frame 120. We can see that though, it says 30 frames per second. Our default Maya files are 24 frames a seconds. So what we need to do is right-click on that, go to Interpret Footage, Main, and then assume this frame rate to 24. Hit Okay, and then click and drag this into a new composition. Now we have our animation that we can export as a movie file by hitting Control M. Then we can set the settings here. I like to use a Apple ProRes, QuickTime. So I'm going to go down to QuickTime and then go to Format Options and choose the Codec, Apple ProRes 422 LT. You may have different options depending on the codecs you have installed in your computer. But essentially, you can just choose the format you want here. Hit Okay, choose the location you want to save it by clicking the name here and also changing the name if you want to. I'm just going to save it in the root folder of the project directory that I had created for this project, hit Save, and then click Render over here and just wait for a second and now we have our movie file. I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll discuss next steps. Thanks for watching.
7. Next Steps: Congratulations for finishing the class and let's discuss some next steps. If you want to learn more about Maya, I have a core series of Maya for beginners that you can check out. I also have some other Maya classes like the Sci-Fi Animation Loop if you want to get in some character animation. Then I also have a medical animation class where I go into more detail about some MASH network stuff, as well as the 3D data visualization course, it's interesting application of Maya. Don't forget to hit the "Follow" button so that you can get notified every time I publish a new class. Don't forget to also check out my YouTube channel and follow me on social media like Instagram, where you can see what I'm up to next. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in my next class.
Lucas Ridley, Professional Animator
