The importance of playblasts

What if you just want to see how your scene is coming along? Maybe you only want to watch the first hundred frames to see if those facial expressions are clear? Maybe you're animating to dialogue and want to see if your lipsync is correct.If your thinking about any of these issues, maybe its time you hit that playblast key. What the playblast does is screen capture each frame and then squeezes it into a video format that you can playback in WMP, VLC, Quicktime (only if you have the quicktime codec), etc. The playblast is based on what your hardware (i.e. video card) can render in real-time. Anyway, seeing the playblast helps you step back from your scene. It also makes it easy to show your colleagues what you've been up to. Finally, playblasting provides you with an efficient form of rendering, meaning one without the bells and whistles ( and time-restriction) of high quality rendering. Now in the example Ive provided, you will see many things. And for those of you with some experience, you'll see that I have made several technical mistakes. The lipsync is off, but that's the beauty of playblast; you can clearly see mistakes! Take a look at this example:









And yes, for those of you wondering, this is a scene from a short film that I was working on. Playblasting was the primary was me and other animators would show each other our scenes and get feedback. Playblast usually create small files, so we easily email them to each other. One caveat to this is that as the scene gets closer to completion, there are more change that the playblast needs to account for. This can mean more frames, more keys and breakdowns, or simply more refined animation curves. This will slow down the playblast, but this method is still light years faster than high quality rendering. The example above is about 24 secs long, which could potentially could takes HOURS to render at film resolution with full color, lighting, etc. The above example took about 10 seconds. So as you can see, playblasts are very useful. They save time when image quality isnt a factor. Playblasts create a compact file that makes it easy to transport thru email or a portable device.

You may also be wondering why Julie, the character in this scene, has no clothes on. NO, I'm not a closet pervert. In order to clothe a character in cg, you have a couple of options. You can either model the clothes as part of the figure (i.e. as if your sculpted the character from clay) or you can use cg cloth. Cg cloth, as you probably guessed, is more render-intensive. And while you can playblast the results of a cloth simulation, it is usually reserved for post production work. In other words, once an entire film has been animated, cloth simulations can be run more accurately since the cloth usually drapes over the geometry that you define as a collider. Cloth simulation opens up a whole can of worms that I think Ill leave for another time.