Covering The Basics of Animation and Playblasting

A ball rig in Maya

This week we covered the basics of animation in Maya by learning how to animate the movement of a ball in a couple different ways. We looked at how to animate using only the graph editor and by doing it in the viewport by setting keyframes on the timeline at important points in the animation cycle. I found that using the graph editor was a little more difficult to get used to that the keyframing method in the viewport but I'm sure with more practice, using the graph editor will be much more intuitive to me.

We also looked at how to Playblast in Maya. A Playblast is a quick preview of what your animation should look like when the final render is complete. It works by taking a screengrab of the animation in the viewport at each frame during playback and then 'blasting' those images back to you - typically in quicktime format, but this can be changed to something else in the settings menu. This allows you to quickly evaluate if your animation is working out as planned without having to commit time to a full render.

By default, Playblasting will generate the quicktime file using the active viewer and the time range that is indicated on the timeline below the viewer - this also determines the animation range that the playblast will render for you. The default resolution is quarter of the size of the active viewer.

As someone who experiences frequent software crashes and doesn't have the best equipment to render from - the Playblasting feature will be invaluable to me when checking if my animations are working instead of wasting potentially hours on a full render that may not be usable in the final cut.