3d preview ?

[harkyman]

Clicking on the "Render" button on the 3D view's header (far right, you might have to MMB scroll to find it) does a "render" of the scene with OpenGL. Holding down the Ctrl key while clicking that same button renders an OpenGL animation of the current view. It uses the Start and End frames from the render buttons, and puts the animation wherever you have the animation path set to, using the file format settings in the Render buttons.

[86point5]

How are you assembling your animation?

For example, are you putting an image sequence together in another application ... if so, are you using the same FPS (frames per second) setting in both Blender and the other application? If you have Blender set to 25FPS, render to an image sequence, and put the sequence together in another application like Quicktime - you need to use the same FPS or else your movie will play faster/slower than you expect.

Another possible culprit (if you render right to animation) ... are you using a codec that can play back at full speed on your computer? If you render to uncompressed AVI (for example) you probably won't be able to play back the video at full speed as you have more data than your computer can process in real time.

[teamcarlisle]

I can't believe I never noticed that render button before. Thanks for the tip Harkyman, thats exactly what I was looking for. As for 86point5's question I'm still pretty novice, I'm more or less trying/learning all different options, don't really have a solid setup yet. I do understand codec fps and calculating animation frames to coincide with that, but I still have a lot to learn about scene optimization, so sometimes I'll have a lot going on and when I hit play in the open gl view, my pc really gets sluggish. Thats why I was wondering about the open gl render, to get a quick animation render of what the 3d view would be like runnung at full speed. I hope I explained that right :)

[harkyman]

Also, if you're just wanting to run the animation in a 3D view with Alt-A in realtime, check out the "Sync" button on the Animation Settings section of the Render (Scene) Buttons. Normally, when pressing Alt-A to run your animation in a 3D view, Blender will go frame by frame, regardless of how long each takes to calculate. With "Sync" enabled, Blender will play the animation back in real-time, dropping frames as it needs to in order to keep time. So, as long as you're still getting 5-10 frames every second out of it, you'll get a nice, in-time preview just by using Alt-A.

[Room335]

check out the "Sync" button on the Animation Settings section of the Render (Scene) Buttons.

Harkyman, I remember that button but can't find it in 2.43? Am I looking in the wrong area for it?

http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=113276&stc=1




(http://forums.cgsociety.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=113276&stc=1)

[harkyman]

You're close. Right now you're in the Scene buttons. On the buttons window header, you'll see a cluster of three buttons: one like the render button, one like a squiggled line with an arrow on the bottom, and one like a waveform. If you hover of the squiggle, the tooltip reads "anim/playback buttons". That's the one you want. Hit that, and you'll see the Sync button.

[Room335]

Thanks Harkyman!

I'll file this one under "I can't see the forrest through the trees" syndrome

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