Dressing the rest of the scene with assets

To finish dressing the scene you can import (or reference) a number of other assets located in the Assets directory. For example, you could:

• Import barricade.mb to block roads and give the fire truck a clear path.
• Import trafficlight.mb and place a copy over each intersection.
• Import park.mb to add a public park.
• Import trashbag.mb and trashcan_A.mb to make the city dirtier.
• Import a few more police cars to create a police barricade.
• Import additional instances of Flames.mb to make all the windows in the building burn.

Notice that assets can range from very simple objects (trashbags, trashcans), to collections of objects (the park), to complex objects with moving parts (the police car), yet all of them are treated as single black box asset nodes in the scene each with a single interface. You could take this further by placing all similar objects (all trash bags and trash cans for example) into a single asset.

You can now batch render the scene to see your finished product.

To batch render the scene

1. If you haven’t done so already, set all proxies to their original representations by -clicking them and selecting Reload Proxy As > original from the marking menu.
2. Position the camera in a spot where you can see the majority of the action.
3. Click the Render Settings button ().

   The Render Settings window appears.

4. Set the following:
   • Image format: Maya IFF (iff)
   • Frame/Animation ext: name.#.ext
   • Start frame: 0
   • End frame: 170
5. Click Close.
6. In the Rendering menu set, select Render > Batch Render.

   Maya batch renders the scene. This may take a few minutes. You can monitor the progress in the Status Line.

When the batch render is complete, you can view the sequence by selecting File > View Sequence, and then opening the first file of the sequence (it has an extension of .001). Maya then plays back the sequence of rendered images showing you the final animation.

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