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Playblasts are essentially screen recordings of your 3D Viewport. So whatever is visible through the camera and what your Viewport Shading is set to (Object, Material Preview, Rendered) is what will be exported. This is a faster way of exporting out camera footage rather than rendering each camera using an EVEE render.
Playblasting may be new for 2D Storyboard Artists but when you start to work with 3D footage, it’s much easier to work with video files than individual panels when it comes to editing. We used playblasts before Blender 5.0 but now with Scene Strips, we can cut animatics together without playblasting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbu4InCU8Mw
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Whippet provides tools to help make exporting and playblasting with Blender a little easier. You can render keyframes as still images, keyframes as reference for backgrounds and playblast camera coverage to mp4 files.
Playblast, Scene & Export Tools Menu
Settings to export and import renders into a VSE scene. Ensure there is a separate VSE scene with a dedicated Workspace and the scene is pinned to the workspace.
Output Folder - filepath where your playblast renders are exported too.
Edit Scene - select your Video Editing Scene that is used for the Sequencer to cut Scene Strips or Playblasts together.
Select Channel # - the channel number to import video strips to the Sequencer in the VSE scene.
Import to Sequencer? - toggle on to automatically import playblast video files back into the VSE Edit Scene
Render Stepped - toggle the constant/stepped icon to render playblasts at every object animation keyframe. To render all grease pencil keyframes stepped, add object keyframes using the **Add X Keys** operator in the Whippet GP panel.
Burn Metadata into Render - toggle on to add metadata into playblast footage.
Quickly toggle metadata Frame, Shot Frame Range, Camera Name and Focal Length.
Active/All Camera(s) to Scene Strip(s) - will create a Scene Strip and automatically assign the respective camera to the strip and slip the timing of the strip to align with the camera.
Playblast Scene Strip(s) - select all the Scene Strip(s) you want to playblast. If you have Import to Sequencer toggled on, then the playblast video files will reimport into the Sequencer above the Scene Strips and be timed out to your Scene Strips. This allows you to switch from using NLE Scene Strips workflow ****to Playblasts to VSE workflow.
Export Stills - renders all selected keyframes for selected objects (hidden selected keyframes are not taken into account) as PNG files. Exports are saved to their respective camera folders in a ‘Stills’ folder inside the Output Folder directory.
Export References - renders all selected keyframes for selected objects (hidden selected keyframes are not taken into account) with two versions, BG and REF, as PNG files. Exports are saved to their respective camera folders in a separate ‘Reference’ folder inside the Output Folder directory.
Playblast Active/All Cam(s) - will export out video mp4 files of the respective cameras. If Import to Sequencer is toggled on, then they will import into the Sequencer on the VSE Channel you set above.
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Check the burn in settings in Render Properties in the properties menu under Metadata section. The text size defaults to 12 which is small. Set it to 30 and the background to black with the opacity level to 0.750. This will give clear burn in meta data on your video strips.
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Export Stills
Select the Keyframes in the Dopesheet you want to export as PNG stills then press the Export Stills button to export individual PNG files per keyframe. The images will be placed into individual camera folders inside a Stills folder within the file directory selected above.
Note: you do not have to select multiple objects and their respective keyframes, only select keyframes for which you want a still for. That may require selecting certain objects if some objects don’t have keyframes for a specific moment you want a still for. You can select GP or Animation keyframes. It’s also only based off of the visible keyframes (non selected objects with hidden selected keyframes are not exported).
Output Folder
Playblast video files (SceneName_Cam.001_T01.001.mp4)
Stills (folder) >
SceneName_Cam.001_T01_F0100 (SceneName_Camera_TakeVersion_FrameNumber)
Export References
To use the Export References feature, you’ll need to tag certain assets in the Outliner as ‘Reference’ to automatically hide in the ‘_BG’.png exports. The purpose for this feature is to block out 3D assets for proper scale in a scene and also export out the background without those 3D assets. That way you can lower the opacity of the ‘_REF.png’ file and draw to scale while having a clean layer (aka ‘clean plate’) to draw over.
See the image on the right. To tag an object, select the object(s) and right+click and check ‘Tag as Whippet Reference’. These objects will be hidden when exporting the ‘_BG.png’ files.
Output Folder
Playblast video files (SceneName_Cam.001_T01.001.mp4)
References (folder) >
SceneName_Cam.001_T01_F0100_BG (tagged objects are hidden)
SceneName_Cam.001_T01_F0100_REF (everything visible in the Outliner)
Scene Strips
Playblasts
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