Playblaster - Background Playblast for Blender 2.8

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Hi to all BlenderHeads out there, here’s a little addon i wrote while working on animation on Blender 2.8.

The purpose is to be able to quickly and without any settings playblast a scene to have a realtime playback, while being able to continue working when you wait for it.

The 3D viewport when displaying a lot of polygons, or having to deal with several rigs can be slow in Blender, so this tool allows you with a simple operator to launch a background playback with very few options to set, when it’s done, it will play in your default media player.

Here is a Gif of the addon working

https://filedn.com/l1cLtWLFxuk7RgOfhLQBgzu/tumblr%20samytichadou/images/playblaster.gif

Here is the Github link

How to Use it :

the addone has 3 main operator, accessible through the search panel (F3 shortcut). The best way of using the addon is to set shortcut for those 3

  • Playblaster settings (playblaster.set_preferences) :
    this is a little panel with a few settings like render engine to use… from it you can launch a playblast or play a previous one
    settings

  • Playblaster Render (playblaster.render) :
    The main operator, it will trigger a background playblast, and play it when done

  • Playblaster Play Rendered (playblaster.play_rendered) :
    If existing, a previous playblast for this project will be played in default medi player

Good to know :

When playblasting, the addon will simplify the entire scene for speed purposes, so every subdivison modifier will be deactivated.

For now the addon only output some video file in order to have the sound, but image sequences are planned.

For cancelling a playblast, you can hit Esc (as stated in the progress bar) but when dealing with multiple windows, you can only do it on one, i didn’t get what’s happening, but keep it in mind if you find yourself with unability to cancel a long playblast.

The addon is developed for my specific needs at this point, so it could be buggy, or lacks of features, sorry about that !

Closing Blender when a playblast is running is a bad idea, the playblast could continue processing, or the project may not be playblastable again unless you manually reset a scene property (playblaster_is_rendering). A fix for that is coming, meanwhile, cancel before quitting :wink:

On windows, the cancelling is very buggy (sometimes the playblast calculation continues, so the file is undeletable (because used by the playblast process) ) and this leads to a nice error, i’m working on this, sorry about that !

The addon was tested on Linux Debian and Windows 10, tell me if you encounter any issue with other OS !

What’s happening under the hood :

For those who are interested, here what’s happening : the addon set a few option after saving the project, create a temp project in the same place (for not messing with the path) and launch a command line render of this temporary file with Workbench or EEVEE as render engine, when it is finished or cancelled, the temp is deleted. For now the playblast is generated by default in config folder of your blender installation, but you can set it in the preferences. The settings of the playblasts (render engine…) are stored in the scene, so every scene and project could have different settings set and stored.

A little roadmap :

  • fix windows error when cancelling
  • code cleanup
  • add some settings for the playblasts (workbench curvature…)
  • add simplify options (no simplify, level of subdiv…)
  • open playblaster folder operator
  • clear playblaster folder operator
  • handle both image sequence and video file
  • tests to find the best video file format
  • let user set the position of the progress bar (in which blender area it appears) because the addon has to refresh this area, so 3D viewport is redraw every time. When displaying EEVEE render, it can impacts performances.
  • external settings preset system
  • view all available playblasts (for this project and other ones) in one panel, and play selected one

Feel Free to criticize, comment, give suggestion…
Hope the addon could be useful for other people out there !
Cheers !

5 Likes
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:angry:

2.8 has a bug that causes the Viewport render to go slow, despide viewport running very fast.
I wanted to try this to see if you did some kind of workaround to get a render faster.

Not only does it not work, it’s disabled when you don’t have a saved file, and when I tried to use it on one of my working files, it overwrote it and all the autobackups because I kept trying to get it to work.

Which it would not.

There’s not any kind of warning here or in the operator to suggest that it will

OVERWRITE YOUR SAVE FILE WHENEVER THE OPERATOR STARTS!!!

The only good news for my file is that I only changed the viewport around.
Yes, that matters because I’m recording my progress, and now the video will have to have a cut because my UI suddenly needs to be reset.

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hi and sorry to hear that. you are right i forgot to mention about the render operator saving the blend files. i tried to be as precise as possible but forgot about that, i ll edit my firt post !

Just as a reminder, the addon as said above is for my use only for now and could be very buggy, so sorry about that :wink:

And you said you were trying to see if i found a workaround for slow viewport, it is not. the addon is just a quick way of playblasting files.

About the autosave, i ll see if there is an option in the blender builtin save operator to avoid creating autosave, i didnt think about that because i use versions a lot…

And about the bug itself, on which Os are you ? and did it throw an error at you ? which one ? if you can elaborate on that i could be able to help !

And about the fact that it doesnt work with unsaved file, this is the expected behavior (i also forgot to mention that) in order to prevent save a temporary file which is “temp_unnamed.blend” and overwrited for each unsaved blend files

Again, this addon is developped for my needs and is still buggy, but i found it stable enough at my work place to share it.

I m sorry the addon caused you trouble with your saves, it should not have messed the project itself at all, “just” saved it.

Cheers

Edit :
the save was mentionned in the first post, even if i should have more clearly stated it :

Blockquote
What’s happening under the hood :
For those who are interested, here what’s happening : the addon set a few option after saving the project,

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No I didn’t

image
Unless the addon renders an animation faster than this button does, it is not quick. It’s just a macro + alternative to this button.

Some people like macros but unless I made it, or can easily dissect it, I don’t.

I’m on windows 7, and all it did was say it’s rendering at the bottom left.
The only kind of discernible error was that one of the times, there was a one-line error message spamming the console, about Gizmos not having the correct space or something.
I figure it’s a Blender internal issue because their silent errors tend to look like this one.

I got it after starting the render then collapsing 2 of my 3 viewport windows then switching that to Image editor (to leave one viewport open, as well as try to see if the addon was rendering the images in a file that I could see).

I also tried it with like 4 frames just to make sure it’s not actually rendering but just slowly like the regular render.

It stays in a modal, displaying a “rendering your animation” message in the statusbar.
But nothing happens.

If you can fix it good for you and anyone else but I doubt this is the Fast viewport render that was in 2.7 and I’ve no intention of re-downloading it.

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Ok right.

here is what happens with the addon (just to clarify) :
it does a background render with eevee or workbench engine, while keeping actual blend opened and showing you the progression of your playblast.

The macro part you’re talking about is just set some render settings, but this is not a macro. It’s neither a complicated addon, it just start a new thread with a command line, and a modal operator to check its progression.

And if you want to check the output, go to the folder you set in the addon preferences, this is the folder where playblast are stored. Tell me if you found anything in it !

Did the progression bar progressed ? or not at all ? it could be a problem in the new thread command line (which is silent by now).

And thanks for the image, i did know about the classic playblast (as you may have guessed) but my point here is to make a one-click (macro type for this part yeah) helper which runs in backgorund without any context and without freezing your blender.

And for the “fast preview”, for now, it just does a workbench/eevee render, so it depends on your settings A LOT. It does use the simplify, as stated in first post, but appart from that, just take a look at your settings. I just put a few override available from playblaster panel which seems to have big impact on render time.
But it does not render faster than usual Blender render, and this is because it is a Blender render, just set up quickly and in background, sorry if my post was confusing

Cheers !

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No progress. Text begins, and nothing more.
Folder is there. It’s empty.

Background render with macros. Got it.

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Hey guys, i just fixed some windows related problem with cancelling a render. Blender didn’t have permission to delete created playblast because of a residual process which owned permission…
And again, this addon launches a background render after saving your project, so be aware regarding auto saves !
cheers !

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Exactly what I needed! Works like gold with 2.93.2. Thanks!

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