Journey through the making off of a 2 seconds scene.

I spent the last days working on my scenes and not properly documenting the workflow since deadline is approaching and that just slows down the process, but pretty much all of them follow the same process described in previous entries. This one is slightly different though, since it involves some new stuff worth mentioning, so let's start:

Hair system in Maya: how to keep static hair unaffected by gravity. 

Hair system comes with the superpower of moving and following gravity as we can see below:

At our left: perfectly well positioned hair curves just where we want them to be. 

At our right, same curves falling due gravity. We don't want that. 

To fix the gravity issue and stop it to keep affecting our eyebrows and eyelashes, we follow this process:

Select all the affected curves. 

Go to your attribute editor and make sure to decrease gravity to zero. 

Then, go to the last frame in your animation timeline, and then hit "set rest position > from start"

And that should do: you have your eyelashes static and motionless :)

(If that doesn't do, try flattening the curves at "stiffness scale")

How to avoid model feature deformation.

Now, it's time to aim for the perfect shot. Sometimes,while importing models from zBrush to Maya, you notice they come slightly deformed and their proportions look quite squeezed. This is actually an optical issue brought to you by your camera and the parameters on it, not exactly an issue with the model itself, and is actually a phenomena proper of optics in general. This video explains it further: 

So, for this shot I created a new camera: 

If you open the Camera Attribute Editor (view -> Camera Attribute Editor, in the viewer menu), you will find a property called "Focal Lenght". By default, is set at 35 mm. If you weren't lazy enough to skip the video, you will remember 35 mm lenses tend to deform features of close shots, so... to keep her features soft and flattering, I need to increase the Focal Lenght number:

As we can see, she looks more proportionate now. 

How to set the animation to match the music.

This is by far one of my favourite things to do: match movement with sound. Is quite logic and straightforward, reason why it quite amazes me people is not doing this more often. 

Your best friend here is Elementary School maths, and process is quite easy:

1. You open your track in a software that allows you to scroll towards a timeline while hearing the sound in real time. I am using Premiere here,  Flash and Audacity can do as well.
2. You keep your ear and eyes sharp and hunt for the exact second where the beat that triggers certain action on your animation shows. You can do it either by just listening, or you can aid yourself with the visual "electrocardiogram-ish" guide of the track itself, usually marks visually how sound is compound, depends on the song, though... and what you are intending to do. 
3. Once you spot your beat, take note as of the exact second and frame it happens. After effects comes with a format of hours : minutes : seconds : frames... so I take note of the exact time  my chosen beats appear in a notepad:

4.  Then comes frame counting! On this example I've got my clip starting at 13:23, and my first beat appearing at 14:12. As I mentioned before, this is a format of "seconds : frames", which means my clip starts at second 13th frame 23th, and my first event at second 14th frame 12th.  Since my footage is 24 fps based, this means every 24 frames compounds a second. So, second 13 frame 23 is just one frame away to become second 14th, while my second event starts at 14:12... this means my event will be triggered at frame 13th. so I set my first keyframe there:

Same, for 14:12 to 14:24, that is the time set for my second event is 12 frames distance, so 13 frames plus 12 frames, gives us 25... which means second keyframe at frame 25. 

Then comes render test:

Then comes matching the test with the sound to check if everything is in order. 

Fortunately it was :)  so now we proceed to proper render and then edition.