How to Make a Playblast In Autodesk Maya

In the beginner's tutorial video above we show how to make a Playblast in Maya. What is a Playblast? A Playblast is a desktop render, and a way to test your animation to make sure that playback is in the real time, so you can test out the timing and spacing accurately.  Every animator needs to know how to make a Playblast; watch the video above to see how to get the settings right. 

Make Your Playblasts Look Like Renders

We're liking this helpful video by Wade Nedstadt, hosted at YouTube, which shows animators how to make a desktop Playblast in Maya that looks almost as good as a full rendered movie file. Wade Nedstadt tweaks the Playblast settings in Maya, and explains how to create a Maya Playblast "that doesn't have to look awful anymore". It's a neat way to avoid long, time consuming renders, and a smart way to speed up your workflow.

How To Make a Playblast in Maya

Autodesk Maya

Sooner or later every student of animation needs to know how to use the playblast tool in Maya. A playblast is a way of playing back your animation so you can see it play back in real-time. 

But why not just press play in the timeline? Doesn't that do the same thing? Unfortunately, we rarely get real-time playback of our animation in the Maya timeline, especially when we are using complex production rigs. So, to see how our animation is working (or not) we really need to know how to use the Playblast tool.

Here is how it works.