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If you want to try rendering yourself, there are several major players:
By a small majority, Maya (a product of SGI) has the most users out there, and
is the most prevalent product. The next largest group of users prefer
Lightwave. The third largest group uses a shareware program called BMRT.
3D animation is probably the fastest growing (25% per year) segment of computer
classes offered at trade schools, junior colleges, colleges and universities.
Generally, the curriculum lasts about a year, and starts with elementary figure
drawing in the context of how the movie/TV industry constructs a story. (The
early part of the courses is heavy on the context and process; you get into the
more detailed aspects of animation and rendering in the later parts.) The
biggest problems with learning animation and rendering at a college are (1) the
machines are usually underpowered, meaning you crash complex jobs a lot, and (2)
there are usually nowhere near enough machines. The second problem is the
result of the fact that rendering a job can take anywhere from a few minutes to
several days, depending on how complex the rendering is, and if you tie up a
machine with a single rendering job, the machine is unavailable for anything
else - including other students' animation and rendering jobs.
A side note: most films run about 30 frames per second. Each frame of animation
must start with a set of wire frame diagrams for every object in the frame that
will move or change in the next frame. Rendering involves applying a "skin" of
texture, light source and intensity, color, etc. to each wire frame diagram in
the frame. What you do in the process of creating an input file for a rendering
program is describe that skin in great detail (there are usually about 30
variables) for each object; the rendering program simply carries out all those
instructions.
How do I know all this? One of our subsidiaries is a little startup called
NetRendered (www.netrendered.com) that does rendering projects online. [Eric -
excuse the shameless plug. I think I contributed enough educational material to
excuse it, didn't I?]
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