Better Playblasts for Maya

• Auto-Select the right camera!
• Rendering options.
• Burn in metadata and frame number.
• Modern and animator-friendly video format (Lightweight intra-frame mp4).
• Auto-save next to the Maya scene file.
• Simple and performant default player (ffplay).
• No need to install Quicktime anymore...

Status:

Documentation:

Statistics:

Progress:

Funding:

Community:

For now, DuBlast works only on Windows, but making it work on Linux should be easy.

• Download the latest release.
• Unzip all the files and folders to one of the Maya plug-ins folder, like:
  C:\Users\YourName\Documents\maya\plug-ins\
• In the Maya Plug-in Manager, click the Refresh button, then enable DuBlast by checking the Loaded box. You'll probably want to check the Auto load box too...

You can create a playblast using the new Maya command dublast.

# Python
import maya.cmds as cmds
cmds.dublast()

// Mel
dublast

You can add this command to a shelf, or use it to create a keyboard shortcut. The provided dublast.png file can be used as an icon with your shelf button.

When running the command, a preview window and these options are shown:

• Camera: Select the camera to use for the playblast. By default, DuBlast selects the first camera found in the render settings.
• Size: Set the size ratio according to the render settings.
• Renderer: Set the render options
• Comment: Set a short comment to be added to the file name and the burned in metadata.

DuBlast automatically burns some metadata in the video:

• The current frame number
• The optional comment
• The name of the camera
• The focal length of the camera

Note that some of these metadata may not be visible if the output size is too small.

DuBlast automatically plays the video with ffplay, a free and lightweight video player well suited for checking animations.

It is a headless player: it doesn't have any user interface, but you can easily interact with the video anyway:

• Right click: seeks in time
• Space: play/pause
• S: go one frame forward
• →: go 0.10s forward
• ←: go 0.10s backward
• ↑: go to end
• ↓: go to start

There's no option (yet) to the command so you can't set the options programmatically to create the playblast without showing the options dialog. But that should change in a near future.

The settings are not saved (yet), but that's a planned feature.

There's no way to change the default player, but again, that's planned too.