Rendering and post-production
Having gotten most of the mechanics of animation and modeling worked out, this week I began mixing the audiotrack using Adobe Audition. I found some great websites for sound loops and FX.
Audition has a nice feature where you can add Markers to your timeline so you know when certain transitions or sound effects should occur.
I placed the previously rendered “glowing figure” scene into Premiere, and added sound effects. I also added the soundtrack from Audition.
I was able to get Maya’s Mental Ray render engine working after installing a service pack upgrade. This caused me to tweak the lighting a bit. I began to batch render a test sample. My laptop was able to batch render 120 frames in an hour 1/2. By my calculations, rendering the entire 1440 frames should take only 32 hours!
Still needs a few tweaks on audio, but making progress.