Outputting Your Work: Playblasting
What’s the use of animating all this work and not being able to show it? There are several ways of outputting your work in Maya, most of which involve rendering to images. One faster way of outputting your animation in a simple shaded view is called playblasting. Playblasting creates a sequence of images that play back on your computer at the proper frame rate. Only if your PC is slow, or if you’re playblasting a large sequence of frames, will your playback degrade. In this case, playblasting 240 frames shouldn’t be a problem.
A playblast, as it’s called in Maya, outputs the view panel’s view into an image sequence or AVI movie. You can also save the image sequence or AVI to disk if you like. Playblasting is done mainly to test the look and animation of a scene, especially when its playback is slow within Maya.
Figure 2-27: Select the Option box for Playblast.
When you have your Solar System animated, output a playblast by following these steps:
1. With your animation completed, click in the Perspective panel to make it active in the four-panel layout (don’t maximize the Perspective window). Press 5 to enter Shaded mode.
2. RMB+click in the Time slider, and select Playblast ❒ from the menu, as shown in Figure 2-27. The Options dialog box is shown for the Playblast options in Figure 2-28.
3. In the Playblast options, set the Viewer to Movieplayer (displayed as QuickTime when using a Macintosh) and the Display Size to From Window. Check the Save to File option, and give your Playblast a name. Set the Scale to 1.0.
Figure 2-28: Options for creating a Playblast preview
4. Because you checked the Movieplayer (or QuickTime on a Mac) option, Maya runs through the animation and creates an AVI movie file on a PC or a QuickTime movie file on a Mac that is based on the Shaded-mode appearance of the currently active view panel (which should be the Perspective panel). Because you also checked the Save to File option, the movie file is saved to disk. By default, it’s saved to the Images folder for the Solar_System project you created on your hard drive. You can also click the Browse button to store the playblast video file anywhere you like. For now, click Browse, and place the file on your desktop. Click the Playblast button.
5. When Maya runs through the animation, Windows Media Player on Windows and QuickTime on a Mac (or whatever your default movie player is set to in your OS) automatically opens and plays the move file of the animation at the proper speed of 30fps, as shown in Figure 2-29. Now you can share your animation with others without having to open Maya and play it back in the scene.
When you’re creating a playblast, make sure you don’t cover the view panel with any other windows, such as an Internet browser, as you wait for the animation to complete. Doing so will create a display error in the playblast output. It’s best to allow Maya to complete the playblast before you use the system again.
Figure 2-29: Creating a playblast movie file is easy.
