I used this because it had a nice Maya setup and had 4 box lights already set up. I made the backdrop a darker colour and adjusted all of the lights to a lower intensity to create a cool cinematic look. The only thing I needed to do was import my assets and put them together.
Once I import my models and set them up, This is what Maya's viewports looked like:
Setup in Maya
Applying Arnold Shaders and Importing Texture maps
I attached Ai Standard Surface shaders to all of my assets and applied all of my textures. It's very easy and you have all of the nodes there for you so it's not complicated to input them. Here are screenshots of all the texture on the assets using Hypershade and attribute editor.
Basic Camera Animation with Curves
I was happy with how everything was setup so I began setting up my virtual camera and rig it with a NURBS circle curve. I could animate the camera by itself but I wanted to be able to control a smooth animation. The camera is parented with the curve so the both move at the same time when they are animated. Now that I have the Camera rig setup. I start setting up my animations and using the Graph Editor to make the animations the way I wanted them. Using the Graph gives you more control when you input your keyframes. Once happy with those animations. I can start rendering. Here are some screenshots of the scenes and what the animation setup looks like:
Rendering
Render Setting in Arnold
Rendering is a bit of a problem. The first issue was the assets were expensive to render because it had so many polygons. The more polygons Maya has, the more time it take to render them. It was more of an issue because of the high quality maps so I hindered render time even more. Despite those problems. The renders came out nice and I liked how they turned out in Post-Production. When rendering with Arnold, you can't render the animations as a video. They can only be rendered as a image sequence. To do that go to the rendering layout of Maya, Click on Render<Render Sequence. Here are my render settings in Arnold: Once all of the scenes were rendered, I needed to start editing In After Effects. There I can do final Colour Grading and further the quality.