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 achieved 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 some reference images to show what it is that I am trying to archive.
 
Modeling
  I modeled the palm branch in maya starting with the stock. I then modeled one leaf and duplicated it using the create animation snapshot. This way I only needed to model the one leaf and key frame in the rotation and scale on one site then I duplicate and scale the leafs on the one side. I then offset the leafs by hand to get the two sets of leaf lines.
 

Using a lattice deformer I gave it the proper rotation and the proper bend. I did all of these things several times until I was happy with the results.
Animation
  In order to get the branch to move naturally I used the Lattice box to give it some subtle movement. Then the 50 frame looped animation was baked into 50 .rib files.
Baking in the Animation
 

A simple box was made as a container to hold the .rib files. Using Prof. Kesson's Mel Script written to help bake in .rib files i was able to read in archived files by entering in on the Pre-Baked Rib option: RIB_Archive\branchanim\branchanim1.0001.rib

Maya will no longer have to deal with the geometry of the branch, PrMan will do that for it. The box on the left is the proxy object for the branch on the right that was rendered from it. The branch when animated went out of the box so the "Ignore proxies Bounding Box" needed to be checked.
Building the Tree
  If the boxes are duplicated then rotated it is possible to make a convincing tree bush type thing which is a very low polly, easy to handle mesh for Maya to handle.
  Here one can see the tree animated with the timing of the animations offset randomly it is considerably harder to pick out that there is only one animation and one branch model.
Materials
 

By applying the Blin Material to the proxies object I am able to adjust the material of the branch and leaves.
More Trees!
  Using the same method as building the branches into trees one can make boxes into trees.
Lighting + Ground Texture
 

I added a plane for the ground then added a black and white tile able beach sand image as the texture and as the bumpmap. I then adjusted the colors to make it more of a sandy color. The ground still looked to flat so I roughed up the geometry a bit.

For the Lighting I used 2 directional lights one slightly yellow and one blue. the blue light is very dim with no shadows the yellow is the main light with depth map shadows.
Final Render - Depth of Field
  I added a little depth of field and a sky background to finish it off.
Final Animation
 
From this project i learned the power of combining the Renderman .rib files and Maya By using the archived files one can make an incredibly detailed scene without bogging down Maya until render time. Changes are easily made all the way back to the individual branch. I would have liked to have used ray tracing shadows but I couldn't get them to work. I also was taught the save often lesson again, I made my best render and lost the maya file and could not recreate the ground color again. I would also like to add some sort of trunk to some of the trees.

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