Window > Playblast

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Window > Playblast >

By default, Playblast previews the animation using the active view and the current time range in the time slider to determine the animation range. The default scale is 0.5, which makes the Playblast image resolution one quarter the size of the active view.

Note

Source images for the movie file are taken directly from the screen display. If the display area has other windows on top of it, the resulting movie file is affected.
Playblast 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.

NotePlayblast is supported for stereoscopic cameras. However, you must install an external stereoscopic player to preview the animation instead of using FCheck. Otherwise, if you use a viewer without stereoscopic support, the viewer only displays the last camera rendered out instead of both the left and right stereoscopic camera output.

NoteAfter installing the external stereoscopic player, you must enter the application path under Application preferences in Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences. Use %f to point to the images/movie for the left camera, and %f2 to point to the images/movie for the right camera.

View: If turned on, Playblast displays the images using the specified viewer. If turned off, blasted images are saved to file according to the Movie file setting in the Playblast Options window.
Show Ornaments: This displays the camera name and the axes at the origin and bottom left of the view.
Render offscreen: For Linux only.

Allows you to run Playblast from the Script Editor with Maya iconized.
Multi-Camera Output: Use this option with the stereo camera to capture the output of both the left and right cameras. If your scene view is in stereo mode, and you select the Save to file attribute, selecting this option sends a set of images/movies to disk.

Viewer

Select one of the following options:

Movieplayer (Windows only): If on, Playblast uses the desktop video playback application specified in your Windows environment to view the Playblasted images.
Image viewer: If on, the fcheck utility is used to preview the Playblasted images.
QuickTime (Mac OS X only): If on, the QuickTime player is used to preview Playblasted images.

Compression

Select one of the following options:

Windows: Compression is only available if the current Viewer is Movieplayer. Opens the Video Compression window. This window lets you define the compression method for the animation you want to Playblast. The list of available compression methods depends on the video codecs you have installed on your system.
(Linux): Since you can only Playblast animation with the FCheck utility on Linux, Compression for Playblast is not available.
(Mac OS X): Compression is only available if the current Viewer is QuickTime. Opens the QuickTime Compression Settings window. This window lets you define the compression method for the animation you want to Playblast. The list of available compression methods depends on QuickTime’s built-in video codecs. For more information on compression methods for QuickTime, search for Compressors at www.apple.com/quicktime.

Display Size

There are three options for controlling the resolution of the playblast images that are created. In each of these three cases, the final size of the images will be further scaled by the amount in the Scale option.

From Window: Makes the Playblast images the same size as the Active view.
From Render Settings: Makes the Playblast images the size specified by the Image Size section of the Common tab of the Window > Rendering Editors > Render Settings window.
Custom: Activates two fields below the Display Size option that allow you to specify the Width and Height of the Playblast images.

Scale: Whereas the Display Size option gives you control over the size as well as the aspect ratio of the images, the Scale option lets you further refine the size of the Playblast images by applying a scale factor to the resolution specified in the Display Size option.

The default is 0.5, which is one-quarter the size of the Display Size (0.5 of the width and 0.5 of the height).
Frame Padding: Specifies the number of zeros with which to pad the file names of the images you want to playblast. This lets you customize your image file names for their intended playback tools.

By default, Frame Padding is set to 4 to support Fcheck.

NoteYou can also use the -framepadding flag for the playblast MEL command to set the number of zeros with which to pad the file names of the images you want to playblast.
Remove Temporary Files: Turn on this option to delete the temporary files created by playblasting when you end your Maya session. Temporary files are written to the C:\temp directory on Windows, and /var/tmp/ or /tmp/ on Linux, and under Documents/temp in your Home folder on Mac OS X.
Save to File: Turn this on to save a movie file or image sequence to disk. If turned on, an entry field lets you enter a filename. You can also click a Browse button to locate an appropriate directory. If the Output Format selection is Movieplayer, the file saved is in Movieplayer format. If the format is Image viewer, the format is read from the Image Format attribute in the Common tab of the Render Settings window.
Movie File: If you use the Browse button to specify the file name for your Playblast image(s), a full path name will be specified.

If a filename with no path is specified for the movie file, the location of the file image(s) is set by your current project setting. If the Images location is specified in the current project window ( File > Project > Edit Current), the Playblast image(s) is created in the Images location. Otherwise, the images are created in the default location of the project.

Playblasting FCheck files

See Overview of FCheck in the FCheck chapter of the Rendering Utilities guide.