Before I started animating my part of the video I imported The inside of the Tavern which was made by Harry, as the dice would be rolling on a table in that room. I had previously used a different scene in Maya to test how I would create the dice rolling animation. The best method I found to get a clean falling animation was to change the menu set to ‘FX’ and then select the model which the dice would be falling onto, in this case the tavern table, and go to the ‘Field/Solvers’ and clicking on “Create Passive Rigid Body” so that the table wouldn’t move when the die landed on it. I then did the same with the dice but selected “Create Active Rigid Body” so they would bounce along the table when they made contact with it. In order to get the die to fall I went back to the ‘Field/Solvers’ menu and with the die highlighted and selected gravity and change the speed in which the Die would fall in the settings.
Once I was happy with the where the dice were landing, I placed a camera in the scene and positioned it by the table but just underneath the dice so that the dice would fall into the frame. I changed my view of the scene to be from the cameras point of view and moved to different angles, I then set a keyframe when I was happy with the camera’s position. This was done in order to get the camera to pan over the table to get different angles of the die falling and also show what number one of the die landed on.
I then began to start tweaking the render settings so that they matched with the ones that my group were making in order to keep the animation consistent. It was important to make sure that before the rendering process that it would render in the same quality.
Once the render was setup I began to render the animation, however, over the 19 hours my computer was rendering I was only able to get 32 frames of the 120 rendered. After speaking to Alec he told me that I should use Maya Renderer 2.0 to render it instead as it would be quicker but the quality wouldn’t be as good compared to Arnold Renderer. When using the Renderer 2.0, the 120 frames took around 8 minutes to render which amazed me despite it being in far lower quality compared to the Arnold Renderer.
Here is a short clip from the frames I was able to render from Arnold Renderer:
