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 purpose, Maya provides Playblast, which produces screen snapshots of your animation and turns them into an AVI file on the PC, a Quicktime file on the Mac, or a series of numbered images.

To create a Playblast preview:

1.

Create an animation.

2.

From the Window menu, select the check box next to Playblast to open the Playblast Options window (Figure 12.83).

Figure 12.83. 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'll 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 uses 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 uses 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 selected, you can click Browse to choose where you want the files saved. You can also make a movie file instead of a series of numbered frames.

6.

Click the Playblast button.

Your animation plays back one frame at a time. A moment later, the FCheck window opens, where you can watch your animation (Figure 12.84).

Figure 12.84. You can use Fcheck to watch image sequences, or use your favorite movie player to watch movies you have rendered.


Using Constraints in Animation

Constraints are most often used to set up a character, but sometimes you'll want to use them while animating. For instance, if a character picks up a coffee cup from a table, it would be laborious to try to animate the cup moving wherever the character's hand doesbut if you parent the cup to the hand, the cup will follow the hand everywhere even when you don't want it to.

Constraints offer an easy way to re-parent an object in the middle of a scene. Let's return to the coffee cup example. On the frame when the hand first contacts the cup, you can constrain the cup to the hand using a parent constraint. By animating the constraint's Blend Parent value, you can tell the cup when you want it to be attached to the hand and when you don't.





Maya 7 for Windows and Macintosh(c) Visual Quickstart Guide
Maya 7 for Windows & Macintosh
ISBN: 0321348990
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 185

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