Join our discord community

Please or Register to create posts and topics.

Issue with maya playblast settings

Page 1 of 2Next

I have been looking through the posts on the forum about maya playblasting and tried all the settings, but with maya 2019.2 the prism playblast export can't get the right framing. I figure it's the overscan setting, but we need the playblast to fit the resolution gate and it does not seem possible. How can we deal with this?

Hi Richard,

It's been a while we were troubleshooting this issue, I thought it was resolved, but seems like there are still some things to fix. I was using Maya 2017 update 5.

Mads Hangaard is from The Animation Workshop and they are the first group to use prism for the graduation project. They are doing previs at the moment and so we were hoping we could use prisms playblast feature througout the project.

Mads, could you give Richard a bit more information, like software version etc. And maybe also make a recording showing the isssue, or a series of screengrabs, and any error logs if there are any. Maybe there are some useful stuff in the maya console? If you can make it work manually, could you share with us the settings you use to make it work?

@richardf

Here's the original thread:

https://prism-pipeline.com/forum/topic/maya-additional-playblast-settings/

Can you confirm that the script is having 'render_offscreen: enabled' and 'Display size - From Rendersettings' and overscan set to 1.0?

 

 

 

Hi Richard,

I'm with Magnus, and we have been going over the playblast settings together. We just took some pictures of the settings we use to get a successful aspect ratio on our playblast.

I've highlighted some of the most important settings, hope it makes sense. Would it be possible to restore the viewport and camera overscan settings after the playblast is finished?

Uploaded files:
  • You need to login to have access to uploads.

Thanks for the detailed description, which settings are working for you.

I added a new setting to the playblast state in v1.2.1.39: "use recommended settings". The tooltip shows these recommended settings:

Fit Resolution Gate: Fill
Display Film Gate: False
Display Resolution: True
Overscan: 1.0

If enabled (default) Prism will apply these settings and restore the previous settings after the playblast. If disabled Prism will not modify any camera settings and simply use the current settings.

I also had a quick look at displaying polygons only. This would be very simple to do, but I need to take another look at how to restore the previous settings. I didn't see a simple way to do this, which is why I haven't added this option yet.

The resolution from rendersettings isn't implemented yet, but probably I will add a dropdown with this option to the state settings in a future update.

I hope the camera settings produce the correct result now.

Thanks Richard!! Will test this tomorrow with Mads.

Regarding 'polygons only' did you check the modelEditor command?

https://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/Maya-Tech-Docs/CommandsPython/modelEditor.html

A dropdown just like in the render state sounds like the perfect solution.

Btw, the project Mads is working on is using Cinemascope aspect ratio, I'm a bit worried that ffmpeg would see that as a 'odd' ratio and won't be able to convert it, but let's see. Maybe we need to figure out a way to make playblasts with letterboxing to keep them to a 'normal' aspect ratio... Let's see...

Thanks Richard, I have tested the new playblast settings and it gets us the right aspect ratio which is great. To improve it further, it could be helpful to set perspShape's displayFilmGate attribute to 0, removing the text showing the render settings resolution. And turn off "Show ornaments" in the playblast settings. This will remove the camera name written in the bottom of the playblast. You can see the attached screenshot, highlighting the settings. As for turning off everything in the viewport besides polygon and then reverting to the original settings, I have written a piece of Python code that is able to do that. There is another option for querying the settings, using modelEditor(panelName, query = True, stateString = True) which will return a string containing a MEL command to replicate the entire panel. With some string formatting, you should be able to extract all the model panel settings through this method, though I have used another method. I have attached the python script.

Uploaded files:
  • You need to login to have access to uploads.

I just disabled the resolution and the ornaments. Sounds like reasonable playblast settings to me.

I also took another look at the polygon display. Thanks for providing the script, but I prefer to stay away from hardcoding object types, because there could be different types in different Maya versions and I'd like to keep it as universal as possible. So I used the stateString option. But there's no reason why I need to extract the objects types from that mel string. To hide all objects I can use:

cmds.modelEditor(vpName, e=True, allObjects=False)

And to revert I can simply execute the mel command. Worked fine in my tests. Hopefully it works the same in your project.

 

Quote from Magnus on 8. December 2019, 16:01

Btw, the project Mads is working on is using Cinemascope aspect ratio, I'm a bit worried that ffmpeg would see that as a 'odd' ratio and won't be able to convert it, but let's see. Maybe we need to figure out a way to make playblasts with letterboxing to keep them to a 'normal' aspect ratio... Let's see...

The Cinemascope aspect ratio shouldn't be a problem. There's only a limitation for odd resolutions in the h264 codec, but if that's the case there are probably some workarounds we could try.

Alright, sounds good. Will try out the new update.

Alright, I've just tested it out and it works very well. Thank you for the help Richard.

Yeeehah! Thanks Richard!

Mads confirmed that it works fine with cinemascope 🙂

Page 1 of 2Next