Rendering out Movies

Before you go wasting a heap of time rendering out an entire movie in final quality without even knowing whether it'll work, I suggest that you first render out a lower-res version. In Maya this is called a Playblast.

In modo, I could never remember how to do this. That's why I am posting it here because I am sure a lot of other people either don't know about it, or else, cannot remember where to find it either. But beware, it won't be a nice looking render. It will look just like your viewport, including lights, camera and locators. It's basically so you can check your composition and timing

An alternative lo-res solution, is to render out your animation with a capped time limit. This will look more like a draft version, and can be especially helpful if you know your scene is going to take say 12-24 hours to render properly - and especially if you know things will more than likely need to be changed, but you just don't want to waste all that time waiting at this point, so you could set it up for say 6 hours instead, so that it can be done say over night.

Okay, so this is not actually MODO-specific, but the other day I rendered out a sequence of images in MODO. .You're right, I could have rendered them out as a movie. But if for some reason you have to shut down your machine, or it crashes - you lose EVERYTHING! - so individual images, though slower, is often a more reliable way..

I was just reminded of something that I discovered last year whilst rendering out my final animation assignment. I had around 1500 frames to render out, and I was fortunate to have two machines to work on. It was late, and I wanted to set them up and go home. But if I started one machine at frame #1, how could I guess whereabouts to start the second machine from to ensure all frames were covered? Simple. Start from the last frame and render out the image sequence in reverse order

The Preview Renderer now lets you specify a total Render Time, giving you a predictable way to meet deadlines as you render out to an image sequence or a movie file.

Although modo tries to fit within the constraints you've imposed, you'll still need to be reasonable. For instance, with movies, say you want one second of video - don't expect modo to render out 24 nicely rendered frames in half an hour.

What I do, is start to render out one frame just to get an idea of how long it will take, and then halve that time and multiply it by the number of frames you have. Yes, it can still end up taking a long time, but it's so worth it especially when you know you're going to have to make some adjustments anyway.

Note: As the time of writing, if you try to place modo in the background while you get on with other work, you will get an error message saying that modo 'lost focus' and aborted. This error message is not evident until you maximize modo again and can be very disappointing if you have been waiting hours already. I suggest like a regular render, that you set it up on a dedicated machine and walk away.

As an alternative, if you just want to check your composition, blocking and timing and you're not fussed about colours, textures, lighting or render quality, you could always do a playblast through your viewport window.