Playblast and Hardware Rendering

Playblast gives you a quick preview of animation without any rendering effects. Frame size, etc. can be set by opening the options window by selecting a small square next to Playblast under "Window." To set the frame size required for Assignment 1 (320 x 240), select "Custom" as Display Size, enter 320 and 240 under "Custom" and slide "Scale" slider to 1.00.

To start Playlbast, select Window... -> Playblast. Windows Media Player or Fcheck (whichever selected in the options window) will playback the animation. You can save the animation as an .avi file by choosing Media Player.


Hardware Rendering gives you more options than Playblast and faster results than software rendering.

First of all, let us set 30 frames per second as the animation playback speed:

1. Select Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Preferences...
2. Select "Timeline" in Prefereces window.
3. Select "Other" as Playback Speed.
4. Type in a number in the white box next to "Other" so that Playback Speed becomes "Other [30fps]".

Before you hardware render an animation sequence, you may change the colors of objects and background as follows.

1. Select Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Colors -> in General tab, find 3D views -> Background: Change it to black.
2. Select Window -> Setting/Preferences -> Colors -> in Inactive tab, find Objects -> NURBS Surfaces (Polygon Surfaces if you are using polygonal objects.) Change it to white.
3. Select Window -> Setting/Preferences -> Colors -> in active tab, find Objects -> NURBS Surfaces (Polygon Surfaces if you are using polygonal objects.) Change it to white.
4. Click "Save".

Open Hardware Render Buffer by Window -> Rendering Editors -> Hardware Render Buffer...
In Hardware Render Buffer, select Cameras -> Persp (or any other view you want to use)
Open Attributes Window by selecting Render -> Attributes...

The following should be set in Attributes:
In Image Output Files tab

• Filename: whatever_you_want
• Extension: name.0001.ext
• Start Frame: 1
• End Frame: 150 (or whatever the number of frames in your animation)
• Image Format: GIF or TIFF or any file format that the editing application of your choice imports
• Resolution: 320 x 240

In Render Modes tab, select Wireframe as Draw Style.
In Display Options tab, select black as Background Color.

In Hardware Render Buffer:
Render the sequence by selecting Render -> Render sequence.
Playback the sequence by selecting Flipbooks -> im.1-150.


Premiere
You can create a quicktime movie from hardware rendered images using Premiere or any digital video editing application of your choice.

In Premiere:

1. Edit -> Preferences -> General and Still Image -> Default Duration 1 frames.
2. File -> Import -> File -> Select all the images in the animation.
3. Drop Bin 1 into Video1A time line. Add a title and credits if required.
4. Edit -> Export Timeline -> Movie...
5. In Export Movie window, click Settings. In Export Movie Settings window, select Quicktime as File Type under "General" and Frame Size 320 x 240 and Frame Rate 30 under "Video".