In this section, you’ll add a new camera to animate and capture your scene in motion. Save your file again as Castle_Project_CameraMove.ma. Select the original projectionCam that you used to line up the geometry, and duplicate it using Command/Ctrl+D. The new camera is called projectionCam1. Because the original projectionCam is locked to prevent you from moving it, you need to unlock the new camera in the Channel Box/Layer Editor in order to animate it. Select the new camera, rename it animationCam, and select all the attributes. Either right-click the selected attributes or go to the Channels menu in the Channel Box/Layer Editor, and choose Unlock Selected (Figure 10-23).
Figure 10-23: Unlock the animationCam attributes in the Channel Box/Layer Editor.
Make sure you only unlock the new camera, not your original projectionCam. If you move the original projection camera, your projected textures will no longer line up with the geometry, and the illusion will be destroyed.
Inserting Keyframes
For anything to change over time in an animation, you must insert keyframes. Keyframes record any change made to the scene between set points on a timeline. In this case, you’ll add a keyframe for the start position and the end position of the camera.
At the bottom of the interface is a timeline showing the 200 frames of the animation. With animationCam selected in its original position, keyframe it at frame 1 by pressing S on the keyboard. Now, move to frame 200 by dragging the cursor to the right along the timeline. Push in until the castle is larger in the frame. At the same time, move a bit to one side to show more change in the surfaces of the castle. Press S to set a new keyframe manually.
Notice that there is now a small vertical red line at frame 1 and at frame 200 in the timeline, indicating that keyframes are set on those frames (Figure 10-24). You can use Autokey to have Maya set keyframes for you automatically by clicking the key icon in the lower-left corner 
. The key turns red when Autokey is active 
. After you’ve set one keyframe on any parameter, Maya will then set a keyframe for you whenever you move to another frame and change that parameter.
Figure 10-24: Keyframing animationCam
When you animate the camera, don’t make your move too wild. This isn’t the time to release your inner Michael Bay. A gentle push-in works best for camera projection (Figure 10-25). If you move too far off axis, the projection will tear and distort.
Figure 10-25: Camera move from frame 1 to frame 200
Save the project. To check out how your project should look with the camera move, you can open Castle_Project_CameraMove_Chapter_10.ma in the Chapter 10 materials on the DVD.
Rendering a Sequence
You’ll render out a 200-frame sequence to see the final camera projection. First, you need to choose a camera from which to render. Open the Render Settings dialog box by clicking the icon in the top icon menu 
. On the Renderable Cameras rollout, from the Renderable Camera drop-down menu, select animationCam. Make sure Alpha Channel (Mask) and Depth Channel (Z Depth) are unchecked (Figure 10-26). Now the camera you keyframed will be rendered.
Figure 10-26: Select animationCam on the Renderable Cameras rollout.
Resize the Final Output
Next, you should resize the final output. If you render now, the sequence will be the same size as the original castle image files, which is too large for this first test. On the Image Size rollout, select 720 × 480. Notice that Device Aspect Ratio changes to 1.500 (Figure 10-27).
Figure 10-27: Select the final size to render out the image sequence.
When you look through animationCam, notice that your framing has changed. With this new size, you may want to adjust the camera position on the first and last keyframes.
Batch Rendering
The filename should already be set to CastleProject, so you’re ready to render. Select Rendering from the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner if it isn’t already chosen. Choose Render Batch Render. Even though little changes on screen, Maya is hard at work: it’s rendering the sequence in the background. To track the render’s progress, consult the lower-right corner, where the boxed line of text shows what percentage of each frame is completed (Figure 10-28). If you set up the project correctly, all the frames should be placed in the images folder in the Castle_Project folder on your hard drive.
Figure 10-28: Rendering information during a batch render
You shouldn’t change Image size or Device Aspect Ratio on the projectionCam. Doing so would throw off the projection alignment. However, you can render any additional cameras you add at any resolution needed.
Now you have 200 still frames of your render, but how will you view them? You could use a compositing package such as After Effects to make them into a movie, but every copy of Maya has a utility called FCheck that you can also use.
Inside the folder containing the Maya application, double-click the icon for FCheck 
. In FCheck, choose File Open Sequence, and navigate to your 200 rendered images. Select one of the images, and click Open. It will take a moment for all the files to be loaded, and then the sequence will play.
You can see how the final project should render out by checking the movie CastleProjectBoxes.mov on the DVD.