Sound Scoring for the Musically Challenged

September.20.2009 · Posted By - Rex

I don’t consider myself a professional editor for the first thing, let alone a musician.  Over the years I have used a variety of methods to add fitting music to animation productions.  Each have their points and uses going forward.  I just wanted to share some of those experiences from you and see if you have any feedback or experience that can help us as well.

We at PerspectX do quite a bit of animation that has to stand ‘on it’s …

Using Maya’s Luminance Depth Preset

August.08.2009 · Posted By - Rex

Maya’s luminance depth preset can do a lot of things for the finished look of your animation, with a minimal expense of render time.  You can use it to generate post controlled fog or darkness, depth based compositing of elements, or for a good, post controlled focal blur.

Maya’s Z Depth channel rendering has a few problems.  It’s not easily read or used by your favorite compositing program, it is not anti-aliased so you may get jaggy side effects by using …

Storyboards pt 1: To Board or not to Board

July.26.2009 · Posted By - Rex

Okay, pardon the cheesy title.  On any animation project we’ve got around here at PerspectX, we’ve asked that question.  And the consensus is that unless your animation is a turntable, it is important to storyboard the project … If an animation requires telling a story, you should storyboard.  The price of not storyboarding, is rehashing and reshaping your work or having your client do it at your expense.  It’s worth a percentage of the project schedule and budget to do …