Once all the animation was completed in Maya, the next step was rendering. I used Alembic as the file format to save and load the animation. Before exporting, I made sure that the model’s geometry didn’t have any faces with more than four edges. In Maya, I combined the geometry in face mode to ensure that the Alembic file retained the materials.
For the scene selection, since my character is a cartoon, and the scene is a combination of a forest and grassland, I designed the environment to be more stylized. I built the first version of the scene when I completed the first animation shot and performed some test renders to ensure the project was moving smoothly.
However, when I continued to promote my animation and collected a lot of data, I felt that my scene lacked details, my texture was too rough, the scene light was too stiff, and the style of the flowers in the foreground was inconsistent with the trees in the background, so I quickly began to conceive a new scene.
I have considered it based on my second role; It looked like an alien cat to set up a semi-alien world with an alien forest of fantastical plants, but when I confidently adjusted the camera and introduced Harlow into the scene from maya, my aesthetics told me that the scene was too realistic and had too much textural detail for my characters to fit in.
So I have the scene now, in the stylized grass with detailed trees and many kinds of flowers, the perfect realization of my story. In the construction of this scene, I refer to the animation of Miyazaki Hayao and the scenes in Zelda games. At the same time, I also use some assets to build my scene quickly and efficiently.