Animated Movies
 

Pls can you guys help me on the processes and the steps in making an animated 3D movie.

hmmm abit of abroad question but im going to assume your asking about the pipeline.......

so this is our company's production pipeline

we start out with the concepts for the clients and after approval we move on to do storyboards for the animation.

After that we start with the modelling and texturing and make a small turntable presentations of the models for the clients (just for updates)

we then start on the rigging and animating the required scenes and make a quick previzualization for the client without any proper lighting (could even be playblasts)

then we move on to fx and lighting and after we are all satisfied with what we have we send them to the renderfarm for rendering

we take the rendered frames to a compositing program(we use after effects ) do your basic color corrections add the effects that would take forever to render in maya like motion blur and finally we render the frames as movie and present it to the client

hope you get an insight as to what is needed to do a cg movie

cheers

Thanks Murambi, ur comment is quite enlightening and helpful but from what u just said, what are the hardware and software make-up of the renderfarm.
when adding effects like u said, do u do it in after effect or in Maya cos doing such in Maya seem to be time consuming.
And what PC requirements would u recommend for this processes if i may ask? Thanks for ur anticipated assistance.

Thanks for that info murambi.

For effects, it really depends on the effect I think. Some effects need to be done in 3D, others can be added in post in AE.
For hardware requirements, I would start out with a single PC, it doesn't sound like you're in the market for a render farm, if you don't mind me saying. Check the min sys requirements for Maya, but I would say get a CPU with 2 or more cores, 4 or more GB RAM, and plenty of hard drive space, e.g. 1 TB. Hope that helps.

well our render manager software that we use is maya backburner 2008( 2011 refused to work with windows 7) as for the hardware our server machine has 16gb of ram (sadly a gaming card) gtx 460 and i7 980x
as for the nodes we are upto 42 computers consisting of i7 920 processors and 4gb of ram no graphics cards though

If you wish to build a simple farm i could assist you just use a bunch of your old computers.

well thats completely upto the fx department it usually depends on how much time we have and what kind of effects are needed but of late we had to really rely on After effects cause of time constraints
As for the pc needed for this nowadays software is gpu dependant so if you can get a graphics card with high bandwith would be highly recommended,If you have a specific budget we could assist you on the right hardware to get the most bang for buck for your cash

cheers

Thanks alot murambi and u too Stwert