Getting Started--- 5 basic tips which could save your sanity

1. Most important and the easiest to forget. Save Often! Save multiple copies on multiple disks/Zips. I can guarantee that anytime you have a strict deadline, you will (a) accidentally delete something very important, (b) have a scene file or texture become corrupted (try seven times in a week!) (c) have a power outage, (d) have a Jaz disk fail (many times) or (e) have the computer freeze after working for two hours without saving. Take a back-up home from work. Anything can happen, so be prepared.

2. While modeling (preferably before modeling), think about the motion the model will have to perform. If you want an arm to rotate at the shoulder while moving up or down, be sure to create an individual parent object for each motion. If you want to make a model of the solar system, each planet would need a separate parent for its rotation around the sun and for its own rotation. The same thing would happen for the moons of the each planet. By thinking about the motion before the model is built, time can be saved during production.

3. When building an object, consider the parts that make up the whole. Do the parts move independently of one another? What parts move together? What about the surface qualities? Consider the appropriateness of the object in the setting. Not everything in a computer rendered scene needs to have a mirror-like reflective surface, but that may be appropriate in a futuristic, high-tech scene.

4. What will the final output be? Is it a still or an animation? Will it be dumped to video, the Internet, part of a multimedia application, or printed? Different levels of quality are needed for each of these options. An animation does not have to be rendered at as high quality as a still for print. An image meant for the web, or a multimedia project does not have be as high quality as a still to be printed. All these considerations can save at least rendering time, if not composition time.

5. Last but not least, how should the animation be rendered, to PICTS or to a QuickTime movie? It really depends on the type of animation. I render to a QuickTime movie when doing wireframe or fast previews. I render to PICTS when rendering the final animation. The advantage of rendering the "good" version as Picts is the fact that I can can experiment more in the amount of compression or frames-per-second as many times as I want and always be sure to get the best possible size/quality ratio - without having to re-render or recompress a movie that is already compressed.

Jennifer Nieland-- 3-4-98