Your Animation Playblasts Can Look Like Renders!

so you've created something in Maya you've animated your shot and it's time to show it to the world post it on social media or at least show it to your mentor get some feedback whatever the case may be whatever you're doing with it it's time to make a movie file now you have two options and you may already know this but you can render it or you can play blast it now rendering usually takes longer there are a lot of really cool technologies now that you don't have to make it take all that long at all but regardless it takes more technical expertise than play blasting so let's just do that and honestly play blasting really looks great most of the time so in this video I'm going to show you how to prepare your animation for play blast make sure everything visually is gonna look good on the other end I'll show you a few camera tricks to make sure you are maximizing the amount of space in your playlist if you have done it before you know that there's like that box where you can see your shot and then there's like borders outside your shot no one wants that everyone else is gonna be a lot happier to watch your work because of these changes so by the way from you here hi I'm sir Wade and I do a ton of animation stuff here on the channel so subscribe if you haven't already and ring the bell so you get notified if new uploads because there's a lot of good ones coming out soon and links below to twitch where I'm live three days a week doing animation stuff live if you have questions when I talk about this kind of stuff or if you want to support the channel I like to patreon as well are you animation tutoring and vote on videos technical stuff but for now let's play blast jumping into Maya so here's a fun little animation just so I'd have something to play bias obviously I didn't do anything with his face it's fun I like it quick sidenote every month I'm now doing animation challenges over on my discord which is free to join it's just a big animation hub for you to come find resources talk to people join the community link below to the discord as well this month's theme was projectile so do this as an example now if you were just running out with animation if you are a student and you just started going to an animation school and you're you're just about to share your work for the first couple of times right a few quick things for you that we've all dealt with and we've all had to overcome don't have anything selected when you do your play blast because if you can see it in your viewport you're going to see it in the final video file so if I have this character's geometry selected like this you're going to see all that mesh grid stuff in the video file and nobody wants that so just make sure you don't have anything none of your set don't have anything selected now beyond that to keep prepping our animation for fly blasting you may want to turn off other things in the scene such as these control curves so being able to turn these off is gonna just take the clutter out of the scene the hotkey as of Maya 2020 is alt 1 on the keyboards but if you don't have Maya 2020 you go to the show menu which by the way if you are using multiple viewports it is independent to each one of these windows and turn off NURBS curves that's usually what's gonna turn off those rings also if you were going to export like a walk cycle or a ball bounce or something from an orthographic view and you have this crazy grid you can turn that off with the grid button it's right here it looks like a waffle and you can just turn that off in all of these some of them you can also go to the show menu and at the very bottom there is a grid toggle so by the way if you are newer to Maya and hitting spacebar and jumping into a specific viewport like I'm doing here it's wherever your mouse is focused that will maximize whatever panel your mouse is over if that freaks you out because you're like ah spacebar doesn't hit play what kind of cruel world is this you can change the hotkey I've just gotten used to it being all TV so alt V is start and stop playback inside of Maya just in case you didn't know that how you do and by the way I have my attempts videos that have a whole bunch of good little snippets like that if you haven't seen them super helpful if you are in a mini tamiya and also if you are trying to clean up your viewport and you have more advanced stuff in here locators lights image planes maybe a de former or - whatever it is you can turn all of that off in the show menu so you can go through here and you know find image planes we'll turn that off you can turn off lights locators all those things can be individually toggled or for a faster way to do it you can usually say show none and then re-enable polygons or alt - that's usually gonna give you just the character meshes let's do some visual improvements to make this look better so what you want to do is come up to this button towards the top left of whatever panel you're in gonna find this graph little blue circles called your resolution gate click on that and it will show you the resolution up at the top that you are gonna be rendering in which you may want to adjust we'll get to that the camera down at the bottom that you're in and you can kind of see the border of what's in the screen so you may want to adjust and reframe accordingly make sure you're maximizing the space there's no reason to have this so far out if there's nothing happening in all this let people actually see your character and all the work that you put into it now I'm gonna come back to some camera setting but first I want to show you how to make this visually look like a render my has a tendency to pixelate all of the edges you've probably seen this before you probably experienced it all of the edges are just very aliased I guess is the technical word for it what we can do is go up to a renderer viewport 2.0 that's what we're using to look at everything and go to this option box that is gonna give us some options and there are a few we want to change the first one that you always want to mess with is anti-aliasing drop that down turn on Multi sampling and crank it up as high as you can go you don't probably want to animate with this setting turned on because it's gonna slow things down but for your playblast what it's gonna do I don't know if you can tell is it's actually smoothing out all of those edges just on our characters geometry so that's gonna make this look a lot more polished a screen space ambient occlusion if you enable this it's going to generate kind of self-generated proximity shadows for your character so I can crank up or down the amount and you can see it gets a little too aggressive at some point but it does give you a sense of depth for a lot of things in your scene a few other touches you can do there is a motion blur option I do not recommend turning this on for most cases if you are trying to fake a render then sure but if you're trying to get animation and feedback like if you're submitting this to a school or whatever don't a motion blur you're probably gonna get critique and feedback on this work and emotional is going to hide a lot of your animation there is one more thing that I'd like I've ever showed in a video before and that's hardware fog this is pretty cool I'm not gonna mess with these settings yet because what I need to do first is go up to shading and turn on Hardware fog what that does is just gray out our whole screen don't panic though what we need to do is adjust these start and end sliders and what it gives you is this like hazy fog I can use the hardware fog to bring focus to certain areas of my shot and as the camera moves you can see that it's simulating depth this will slow things down you don't want to animate with this on but again for preview purposes it could be kind of cool and you can adjust the color and so remember to turn that on and off it's not in the hardware settings you can adjust it here but it's in shading hardware fog so we have the big 2r anti-aliasing and screen space ambient occlusion was the two main ones are gonna make this look like a render also you can add shadows to your viewport that's gonna make a really big difference especially if you're doing a walk cycle or really and thing body mechanics you want to make sure that you can see the contact point so I do have a video showing how to add a quick three-point lighting setup to your playblast to make things look really nice check that out I'm not gonna get into lighting in this video because I've already covered it you can't really tell if his fingers are actually on the button so if I go up to lighting shadows I actually enable shadows in the viewport now there are a few more things to cover on one hand we have the camera side of this making sure that we don't have a weird border around our playblast we'll get to that in a second but first I want to show you a few potential problem points you could run into so the first one is when you actually go to play blast you have different settings on a Mac or a Windows computer if you wish to play blast you can be in the animation menu set and up the top there is a playback play blast and then there's an option box I've literally never clicked on this one because I just do it from the timeline you make sure your timeline matches whatever the length of your shot is that you need and you right-click in the timeline you'll see play blast down here it's the exact same thing as in the menu whatever is more convenient for you and you hit the option box you need to make sure you click this option box to enable the proper settings so this is the default settings if you're on Windows now this is the big one you want to change the format from avi in a lot of cases to QuickTime to Qt a lot of computers have an issue with avi you may not be able to upload it properly to your review site of choice or bring it into a certain piece of software sometimes it just gets weird and I have a lot of people messaged me asking that question so I always recommend you export to a QuickTime format if you do not see this in your computer windows users it's because you have an installed QuickTime on your computer quick times no longer supported by windows it's no longer like security being updated whatever but this is a reason that you should just go grab it get it from the reputable like QuickTime website don't get it from some weird virus place and once you install it close when we open Maya you should have this in here should be fine this gives you the right codec to be able to export in whatever format within a quicktime wrapper the next we want to do is change the encoding from PNG scroll up and change it to H 0.26 for and I've seen a lot of people not mess with quality I don't know I just I just go to 100 but you could probably leave it if you need if a smaller file size I don't know now when it comes to the display size this is where it gets funky depending on your particular monitor that you're using and what computer you're if you're on a laptop or whatever display size from window we'll just kind of go with whatever you have on your screen your resolution it's not super reliable and it's gonna give you weird sizes if you have a small screen versus a 4k monitor you're gonna get very different file sizes that may be hard to upload so my recommendation is either go to custom and then set it manually here and then scale well a hundred percent of that so one that's one way to do it however you don't have a ton of control I always go from render settings and I'll show you how to do that in just a second the next thing is you need to make sure you turn on save to file because otherwise you just get a temporary file that when you close it it gets deleted and you never have your video I do highly recommend that you hit the Browse button and you go pick a location for this file to go and you do this every time you play blast here's one big problem that everybody runs it to at some point or another let's just say you have your file your Maya file that you've been working on and you've been saving it's in this folder here and then you play blast and you look in that folder and your flight bus is just not there it's not on your desktop it's not in your downloads and it's not anywhere you would think it should be then eventually you may find it in C user your name documents Maya project default it's all it's it's somewhere stupid no one ever wants it there the reason it does this is because you haven't set your project most likely you haven't set your project and that's why it's just going to its default directory in your Documents folder so if you are running into that that's where they're going they're going to your your main document My Documents folder Maya projects default movies you're welcome but to change that we're gonna want to set our project first of all you can change just where it's going but hitting browse setting it and then hitting OK and then you hit play blast and then it'll run through and it'll work just fine but either way you want to make sure you go file set project use your project window and your set project this will allow you to kind of set and tell Maya hey I'm not working in that default directory I'm working in a new directory if you want more details on that it's in the Maya tips video so again go check that out and I won't bore you with it here now if I go ahead and run a play blast with all those changed settings you'll see a quick little preview of what we're gonna get and then it'll try to open the file if for any reason your computer's like can't play the file not support it it's probably just the default player doesn't know how to deal with that but in DLC they were fine like that that's exactly what I'm talking about it gets weird but regardless you can see here that it has a border and we don't like the border so let's let's fix that and let's also just fix the resolution because it's just doesn't look that great it's very low res the first step is to go to our render settings it's the film slate with the little gear next to it we can change the renderable camera and you want to make sure that you actually tell it to use the specific camera that you want for presets we can just change the resolution to H 720 or HD 1080 let's just go full 1080 device aspect ratio copy this number this is the part that gets slightly technical but I promise it's not that bad I'm gonna select the camera that I want to render from or playblast from to select this camera I'm gonna click the camera icon in the top left corner of this panel I'm gonna make sure I'm in the attribute editor so if it looks like this on the right hit control a and it'll jump to look like this you can change your focal length you can change all of your camera settings from here there's a few that we specifically want to mess with if ever you're getting weird artifacting like you're zoomed out or something and maybe your character is doing this I'll do this to really show you make the NIR clip plane bigger so you know change whatever it is 0.1 0.2 0.5 something like that should fix your problem if it's happening to your background elements things are disappearing and the background things are too far away increase at a zero to the far clip plane now remember we though we copied that number where do we put it you need to put it into film aspect ratio so right here under the film back drop-down film aspect ratio trobee granby or whatever you're using stick that in there now our camera is prepared to render a 1920 by 1080 with the proper aspect ratio in our playblast if you need to reframe or do anything go for it and there's one more thing we want to do but with the resolution get was this fit resolution gate you want to make sure you change this to overscan and then what you want to do to make sure that it fills the screen completely because again this is what we're rendering we're rendering the full everything we see here we're gonna look inside display options and by the way if you don't want the 1920 by 1080 at the top you can turn on film gate and turn off resolution it'll actually get rid of that you can set the mask opacities and then change the overscan from 1.3 or whatever its default is 2 what's gonna do is zoom in on the actual shot that that square border of your shot it's gonna get rid of the outer border there is one more thing that you can adjust to not have to like deal with keep switching all these settings back and forth back and forth and that is you can go to the show menu where I've been messing with like all these things if you want to keep this stuff on and you don't want to worry about remembering to like oh I forgot to you know turn that off or hide those you can actually go to the show menu and go all the way down to play blast display and you can turn everything off except you make sure you come back in and turn on polygons but if you are gonna use this play blast display you need to make sure you check this box at the top very important override viewport override viewport tells it that hey when you play blast use this menu instead of this left menu so and here we go not only do we have a beautiful clean non Pixley edges you know it's not lit or anything but it's a playlist that looks nice it's 1080 and it's full screen if you go to a regular college a regular University and you're uploading this to a professor and you're gonna show this in class and you don't have some custom tool like animation mentor does or sync sketch or keyframe MP or something like that you may want to turn on current frame and then play blast and what that's going to give you what that's going to give you is this little tiny frame counter in the very bottom right corner that way if you don't have a like a scrub player something built for animation and someone goes oh hey right here I think you should make this change they don't have to just say like in this general area when this is happening and you're like okay I got to make a note of that you can actually look in the corner and say ooh frame 28 I need to make this change on frame 28 the only last thing to make this look good is to light it to add a simple lighting setup to just make it look a little bit more appealing to make it look a little bit more lively and again that's something that I covered in that other video so I'm not gonna deal with it here if you watch this and you watch that and you combine the knowledge of those two videos you are set your playlists are gonna look amazing and you're going to get much better feedback from whoever's sharing notes with you because they'll be able to see what it is you did and you'll be able to see it better yourself while animating if you found this helpful please hit this button somewhere people see this video and subscribe if you haven't already again if you want to ask questions live I'm live three days a week down on twitch links below for everything animation tutoring on patreon all that good stuff anyways thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed this video I hope it helps you share with a friend share it with classmates anybody else who could benefit from it I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 51,004

Rating: 4.9574647 out of 5

Keywords: maya playblast, playblast, maya, maya 2020, maya viewport, viewport settings, animation playblast, playblast tuturoail, how to playblast, why is my playblast, maya animation tips, animation tips maya, rendering in maya, maya rendering, animation rendering, export animation, export 3d animation, maya tips, maya lighting rendering, share maya animation, maya animation, 3d animation, 3d animation playblast, play blast, autodesk maya, maya animation tricks, maya render

Id: 890_yXk7NZg

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020