Playblast is a term used by a famous commercial package to indicate the preview of the animation in true speed; although I've heard only very few people using it in relation to Blender, I thought it might be a good way to indicate the fast OpenGL preview rendering obtained for checking the animated action.
Start Blender and load the Gidiosaurus_lighting.blend file.
- In the Outliner, select the Light_key lamp item and go to the Object Data window, under the Spot Shape subpanel, to disable the Show Cone item.
- Repeat the procedure for the Light_back and Light_fill lamps, then disable their visibility in the 3D viewport by clicking on the respective eye icon.
- Disable the visibility in the viewport for the Gidiosaurus_proxy item (the linked and proxified rig) also and/or disable the 11th scene layer.
- Save the file as
Gidiosaurus_playblast.blend.
Here are the steps to begin with the OpenGL rendering:
- Put the mouse pointer inside the 3D viewport and press the numpad 0 key to go in Camera view; press the Z key to go in Solid viewport shading mode, then scroll the mouse wheel to zoom the Camera view inside the window:
The Camera view in Solid viewport shading mode
- Go to the Render window and to the Dimensions subpanel; check for the X and Y sizes of the rendering under Resolution, specified in pixels, and move the Percentage scale for render resolution slider, usually set to 50%, to 100%.
- Go down to the Output subpanel and click on the folder icon button to the end of the path slot; browse to the location you want to save your rendering, then type in the first line of the path to the folder you want to create at that location, followed by the slash (
/) and press Enter. - A pop-up will ask you to confirm the creation of the new directory; confirm and then type a generic frame name in the second line, go to the left side vertical bar to be sure that the bottom Relative Path item is enabled and finally click on the Accept button at the top left of the screen.
I used playblast for the folder and plbst for the frame name respectively.
The new directory and the rendered frames name
- Save the file, then go to the Camera view toolbar and click on the last ciak icon button to the left to start the OpenGL playblast:
The two buttons to start the OpenGL rendering (for a still to the left, for the animation to the right)
In our example, the OpenGL playblast rendered single .png images with an alpha background because, as you can see in the Render window visible in the previous screenshot, these are the settings of the Output subpanel. Be aware that the resolution, the format and the path where the playblast frames are saved, always depend on the settings in the Render window, the same settings that will be used for the final real rendering (but of course the resolution of the playblast can be easily and temporarily be made smaller with the slider of the percentage scale).
Once we have rendered all the frames, we can use an external player to see them in sequence (in Ubuntu, I use the free player DJV Imaging, http://djv.sourceforge.net) or, just quickly build a movie through the Blender Sequencer:
- Go to the Screen datablock button on the top main header and click it to switch to the Video Editing screen:
Switching to the Video Editing screen layout
- Put the mouse pointer in the Video Sequence Editor window at the bottom and press Shift + A; from the pop-up menu select the Image item (Add an image or image sequence to the sequencer), then browse to the
playblastfolder location, click on it and once inside, press the A key to select all the contained frames, then press Enter to confirm. The frames are added to the Video Sequence Editor window as a single strip and the current frame appears in the preview window:
Loading the rendered frames in the Video Sequence Editor
- Go back to the Default screen and to the Render window under the main Properties panel. In the Output subpanel, where you can change the path to save the movie in a different location (or also leave it as it is), click on the File Format button to select a Movie format, for example, AVI JPEG. Choose BW or RGB and the Quality compression ratio (but the default 90% is usually OK); then go to the Post Processing subpanel and ensure that the Sequencer item is enabled:
The Output and the Post Processing subpanels inside the Render window
- Go to the top of the Render window and click on the Animation button; remember that Blender uses two different buttons to start the rendering of a still image or of an animation, both for the final rendering and for the 3D viewport toolbar OpenGL preview we have seen in the How to do it… section.
The rendering starts and the Sequencer processes all the .png images outputted by the playblast, transforming them into a single compressed .avi movie then saved in the same directory as the frames.
The process is visible in the UV/Image Editor window that replaced the Camera view, indicated in the toolbar by the Render Result label on the image datablock to the left (because the Image Editor item is the one selected in the Display slot under the Render subpanel) and by the Sequence label visible in the Layer slot to the right:
The Render Result window