As part of the previz team in UTS ALA one of my responsibilities was to organize and clean up the set environment. Unfortunately at the beginning of the project, assets were just imported randomly without following any naming conventions and placed haphazardly across the environment. The workflow that was adapted was:

1. Fixing the asset files

Also in the settings (running man icon with cog wheel) check:

under timeslider tab

2. Clean the base ground geometry

The environment is an outside forest glade and there are multiple ground planes, cliff faces and rocks. This was cleaned to get rid of all the unnecessary prefix information and  rather than having many groups within groups, simplify to be a single group. As well as simplifying the actual mesh geometry that was a mess on its own… giving me a headache thinking of all the ngons and inverted faces that were in the cliffs but that is a problem with modelling not to do with scene population.

To fix the outline there were two things that had to be done:

Both of these methods save a lot of time in cleaning up the outliner since you don’t have to click one by one and change each name you just do them all at once.

3. Populating Scene

Referencing! before today I was not aware that Maya had a referencing system and I am so happy to have learned about it. So as the previz environment progresses the trees that were cylinders and spheres changed to be a bit more organically shaped but it is a pain to reimport every element that keep on changing. With referencing Maya will basically do it for you like referencing Illustrator documents in Indesign.

After having to work through this whole process one can see why its beneficial at the start of the project to set the workflow rather than do it later midway. Even if people want to jump straight into modelling, taking time to set this properly at the beginning will save a lot of time in the future.

 

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