Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
g roU ping t erminology
(continued)
g roU ping t erminology
(continued)
example, if you select Node A, Shift+select Node B, and then choose Edit
➔
Parent, Node A
will group under Node B and become its child. This is the same procedure as MMB+dragging
Node B to Node A in the Outliner, as you did with Pluto's moon and Pluto itself.
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.
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
r
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 2.27
Select the Option
box for Playblast.
Figure 2.28
Options for creating
a Playblast preview
