Playblast animation

Warning

When playblasting an animation, ensure the Render offscreen option is turned on in the Playblast Options, or make sure that the area you want to playblast is not obscured by any windows.
If an open window obscures the area where the screen will be grabbed, the first frame of your movie will display part of the window. This can also occur when a screensaver appears partway through playblasting a long animation.
Playblast uses the $TEMP directory on Windows even if Save To File specifies a different directory. Make sure there is enough disk space to hold the playblast file in your $TEMP directory.
Once your playblasted animation displays in a viewer window, you must close the viewer if you want to playblast the scene again. Maya cannot playblast the same scene again if the movie is still displayed in the viewer.

To playblast an animation

Create or open an animation.
Select Window > Playblast > .
The Playblast Options window opens.
Select the Format for the movie output.
The Encoding drop-down updates automatically with associated codecs.

NotePlayblasting depends upon your system movie libraries to generate the selected compression scheme. Autodesk cannot guarantee the reliability or success of all codecs available to your operating system. See Codec support for additional information.
(Optional) Select the codec you want to use from the Encoding drop-down list.
Set the compression Quality value you want.
Set Display Size to From Window.
Click in a view to make it active.
Click Playblast.
The scene plays in the active view for the playback range in the Time Slider. After each time frame is drawn, Maya takes a screen grab of the active view.

Depending on your platform and which output Format you selected, a new window opens and previews the playblasted animation. For more information, see Window > Playblast.

TipIf you set a sound file (or files) to display in the Time Slider while Playblast is running, and you select a movie file type as the output Format, the sounds are included in the resulting saved movie file. See Display audio on the Time Slider.

To output single frames of your animation to Playblast

NoteThe -frame flag overrides any -startFrame/-endframe flags.

To cancel a playblast

To run Playblast when Maya is minimized on your screen (Linux only)