Author: Debi

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.

If you're a photographer, when it comes to setting up your cameras for rendering in modo, you'll no doubt understand aperture sizes, what 'depth of field' is, and what F-stops are. But some of us who don't have a feel for these numbers need to eyeball things in order to get them how we want. In this Lux TV video from some time back, Brad shows how to access the advanced feature in the modo toolpipe allowing you to display extra handles to position the camera when using depth of field. He also shows how you can click on a point anywhere within a scene and have the camera focus there automatically.