ANIMATION

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.

In this video, Brad brings in a mesh that already has a morph applied. Then he imports an audio clip, and then using the schematic viewport, wires the audio to the morph animation to produce a woofer speaker pulsing to the beat of the music.

Supplied by Luxology

Released during 701

Key points:

• While under the Setup, you'll find an Audio tab under the panel in the top-right. Drag in an audio clip (multiple formats are accepted). Right-click to play.
• In the schematic viewport drag in sound channel modifiers and the morph, along with multipliers to the increase the intensity and an emitter to spray out particles to the beat of the music.
• Also shows the waveform display

Brad Peebler