Playblasting

Playblasts are Maya's way of creating a preview of your animation that runs in real time and is much faster to output than a render. When playblasting motion that somebody else is going to review (for both turn-in and production), you will want to take extra care to make a "clean" playblast. The steps below will help you do this.

Instead of playblasting from one of the default views, you will probably want to make a new camera (name it "render_cam" as an internal convention), position it, then lock its transformation attributes so you don't accidentally move it. When setting up your camera view make sure that it is a reasonable distance from your animated object or character. It shouldn't be so far away that you can barely see the motion, but it also shouldn't be so close-up that part of it gets cut off.

Once you have the camera set up select the viewport you want to playblast from. In the Show menu there will be a long list of object types that can be shown or hidden. For now you just need to uncheck the grid and NURBs Curves. Unchecking NURBs Curves will hide the ball rig controls.

Next, go to Window → Playblast options. The main options that need to be changed are listed below.

• Show Ornaments: Turning this off will hide all Heads Up Display screen elements such as the camera name, view axis, and polygon count.
• Format: Quicktime gives us the most diverse selection of compression formats.
• Encoding: H.264 will be the go to format, as it's fairly good quality and has low file sizes. If Quicktime is not available, which would be the case if you were using Maya 2012 on the lab workstations, you'll want to set the format to avi and the encoding to MS-CRAM.
• Quality: The default is 70. Crank it up to 100.
• Display size: Select "From Render Settings". Make sure to go into the Render Settings and set the resolution you want. 1280x720 is usually what gets used.
• Scale: When doing preview playblasts a scale of 0.50 will work. This will result in a movie that has a resolution of 640x360. For the final turn-in make sure it is set to 1.00 though.
• Save to file: Set this to a convienent place. If you do not specify a save path Maya will output it to your current project directory, which by default will be here:
  
  C:\Users\[User Name]\Documents\maya\projects\default\movies

You should now be ready to playblast. The settings should stay the same while the scene is still open, so you don't need to constently revisit the options. A quick way to spit out a playblast is to right click the timeline and choose Playblast... at the bottom of the menu.