From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

Using the exercise files - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Rendering in Arnold 6

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Using the exercise files

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- [Narrator] If you have access to the exercise files that I provided with this course, go ahead and download those and extract them to a convenient location. I've got them here on my desktop. If you don't have the exercise files, you can still follow the demonstrations using your own assets. And in fact, even if you don't have Maya, you can still learn by observation. For example, if you're watching this course on a mobile device. Let's take a look at what I have provided in the exercise files. There's really only three folders that contain any assets. Most importantly is the scenes folder. And these are all the Maya asci scenes I've provided. There's usually one scene file per movie. Sometimes there will be a finished example of what that should look like at the end of the movie. If you don't see a finished example, then that means the end state is represented by the next movie. In other words, the end state of 02_02 is 02_03. Additionally, there is a references folder. If we go in there, I've got some scene files that are referenced in these master scenes in order to save disk space. We've also got some source images, and these are of the type PNG or HDR or EXR, but you'll also see .tx files. These are Arnold files, generated during the render process. Arnold MIP maps all of the incoming textures, and that means it performs a process where it produces multiple sizes of that texture and embeds them all inside a single file. And this is done to save memory at render time. They speed up your renders. Just be prepared that using Arnold, the disk footprint for textures is going to be doubled or perhaps tripled, due to the .tx files. I've also got some rendered images I provided in the images folder, under examples, and these are some renderings of example images that we create during the exercises. If you're using these exercise files, then you'll need to point Maya at the project. If you're not using the exercise files, you'll need to create a new project. Let's look at creating a new project first. In Maya, I'll go into the File menu, to the Project Window, and click the New button. Give our new project a name. We can call it Maya_Arnold_6, taking care to put underscores instead of white spaces. Then set a location for the new project. Click to browse, and I'll just store it on the desktop. Click Select, and then click Accept. And now a new folder is created on the desktop, and Maya is currently pointed to that project. If you want to use the exercise files, you'll want to set the project to point at those files, once again in the File menu. This time go to Set Project and navigate to wherever that project is located, in this case, on my desktop. Just choose the root level of that folder and click Set, and then when you go to the File menu and choose Open, you're taken directly to that project's scenes folder. Okay, I'm not going to open any scene right now, so I'll just close the window by clicking Cancel. That's how to create a project folder or to set Maya to an existing project, such as the exercise files.

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