Previewing Your Animation

When you want to preview an animation, you can play it back in the timeline. However, a complex scene won't play smoothly at full speed. In addition, you'll often want to output your animations. For this, Maya provides Playblast, which produces screen snapshots of your animation and turns it into an AVI on the PC or a Quicktime on the Mac file or a series of numbered images.

To create a Playblast preview:

1.	Create an animation.
2.	From the Windows menu, select the box next to Playblast to open the Playblast Options window (Figure 12.90). Figure 12.90. You set the Playblast options in this window. If you don't click Save to File and you close your movie player after you watch your animation, you will have to repeat the Playblast procedure on the animation.
3.	Choose the time range for the movie file you want to create. The Time slider will use your current playback start and end times. The Start Time and End Time fields allow you to enter your own times.
4.	Adjust the resolution of the movie. If Display Size is set to From Window, the movie will use whichever view panel is currently active as the basis for the size. If you change Display Size to Custom, you can enter whatever resolution you want.
5.	Select Save to File if you want Playblast to automatically save your series of numbered frames after you create it. If Save to File is checked, you can click Browse to choose where you want the files saved. In Windows, you can make a Movieplayer file instead of a series of numbered frames.
6.	Click the Playblast button. You will see your animation play back a frame at a time. A moment later, the FCheck window, where you can watch your animation, will pop up.