Storyboarding and the Story Reel - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 55

Before exporting the story reel as an anima-
tion, there is one more thing to do. The Scene
Buttons contain a Stamp panel that begins its
life docked behind the Format panel. By bring-
ing that panel forward and clicking the Enable
Stamp and Draw Stamp buttons, you can have
Blender burn various informational notes into
the animation for later reference. Set the panel
up as in Figure 4.56 to include both the frame
number and the time stamp in the animation.
This will make it very easy later on to use the
story reel as a reference for timing.

If you would like to show the animation outside
of Blender, the render controls that you use for
making and saving still images all apply, with a
few additions. First, you must enable the Do Sequence button in the Anim panel of the Render Buttons
( F10 , Figure 4.57). Then you choose one of the animation formats from the Format panel: either MOV, AVI,
or FFMPEG, depending on your operating system and needs. Finally, you enter a path and fi lename on the
Output panel so that Blender knows where to store the animation. Clicking the folder icon to the left of the
path fi eld will open the fi le picker so that you can interactively choose the save path. A good suggestion at
this point would be to use the export folder you created in the last chapter. The Output and Format panels
are shown in Figure 4.58. When you are ready to generate an animation of your story reel, press the Anim
button, as opposed to the Render button.

Figure 4.56 The Stamp panel

Figure 4.57 The Do Sequence button tells Blender to “render” the strips in the sequencer

Figure 4.58 The Output and Format panels set to save an animation