Take a journey to another world with Lee Lanier and learn how to animate and render a professional-looking space scene with Maya. In this course, the first in a two-part series, Lee provides you with two prebuilt models, a spaceship and an asteroid, which you'll keyframe to create a near-miss meeting in an orbit around an alien planet. You'll also add cameras, light your scene, and set up render layers and mental ray render passes to give the animation color and depth. Last, Lee shows you how to focus the ship's laser beam on the asteroid, shattering its surface with a dynamic simulation and kicking up clouds of space dust with nParticles, and then render your results.