Playblast animation

User Guide > Animation > Animation > Animation Basics > Playback animation >

Playblast animation

Warning

Playblast creates a movie by screen-grabbing your animation one frame at a time during playback.

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 also occurs when a screensaver appears partway through playblasting a long animation.

When playblasting an animation, make sure that the area you want to playblast is not obscured by any windows.

Playblast uses $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.

To playblast an animation

Create or open an animation.
Select Window > Playblast > .
The Playblast Options window opens.
Select a Viewer.
If you selected Movieplayer or Apple^® QuickTime^® as your viewer, select a Compression method.
NotePlayblast AVI creation calls upon the system movie libraries to generate the selected compression scheme. Autodesk cannot guarantee the reliability or success of all the compressors available to your operating system.
Set Display Size to From Window.
Click in a view to make it active.
Click the Playblast button.
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.

The Movieplayer window (Windows), the FCheck utility, or QuickTime window (Mac OS X only) opens and previews the playblast animation. For more information, see Window > Playblast.

NoteIf a sound file is displayed in the Time Slider while Playblast is running and the Output Format is set to Movie, the sound file is included in the resulting saved file.

To output single frames of your animation to Playblast

Use the -frame flag with the playblast MEL command.
For example:

playblast -frame 1 -frame 4 -frame 7

outputs frames 1, 4, and 7 of your current animation to Playblast.

For more information, see Help > MEL Command Reference.

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

To cancel a playblast

Press the key.

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

Use the -os/offScreen flag with the playblast MEL command.

For more information, see Help > MEL Command Reference.