Paul Kim - Pre-Baked Animation

The static images, movies and technical breakdown on this page demonstrate how an animation can be baked (exported)
as a sequence of rib archive files. An explanation is also given of how other Maya scenes can reference
the achived assets in such a way that complex scenes can be rendered without the need for Maya to directly
display multiple copies of the original geometry.

Here are the models of the saw palmetto that I modeled.
On the left is the lo-res, middle is medium-res, and on the right is the hi-res.

Here is a shot of the IK rig that will be used to animate the fronds.

Here is the animation of the single frond that will be baked into our later scene.

Here is a screenshot of the proxy that I set up. From here, Maya/Renderman will reference the RIB file
created using the medium-res branch and substitute it in forthe box when rendering.

However, when I tried to render it out, I got an error stating:
// Error: (01/23 16:58) rman Error: R12001 File RIB_Archive/palmetto_mid.rib cannot be opened by RiReadArchive. //
// Warning: (01/23 16:58) rman Warning: Z10002 Primitive pCubeShape15 is not visible to camera or traced rays. //

I'm not sure as to why this occurred, since it worked in class when we were going over it.

Ok nevermind, I got it to work now. There were two things I was doing wrong. One, I forgot to run basher.sh before opening Maya.
Two, the project folder wasn't set.

Here is a quick render without any textures and only lights.

I used a ramp shader and applied it to the proxy boxes here.

Here is a render of the palmetto with some lighting and shading.

Here is a better render with more lights as well as a backdrop.

Here is the animation of 90 frames.

Next, I baked out the entire group of boxes as a separate RIB file and then made a single cube big enough for the entire thing.
That's when all the problems started coming up.

First, only two of the fronds were animating.

Second, even though I would have about 10 proxies, only 3 of them would show up.

This is a screenshot of the setup I had. You will notice that I have a lot of proxiesset up. However, when rendered out, a lot of them chose not to render.

Third, every frame was starting to take up to a couple minutes rendering, and having 90 frames, that would have taken forever.

So I ended up getting rid of the spotlights that I had
in the scene, and ended up using a single ambient light.

All in all, baking out the fronds into one RIB file and proxying a single cube from there
was a big pain in the butt.