A little known fact about blender is that you can use it as a handy little flipbook/seamless animation player by launching it with blender -a filepath/filename (where the file can be an avi or the first in series of pngs /jpgs /etc) This is the same player launched when you click “anim” from the 3D interface.
Recently, Kursad – relatively new to blender and linux but not to 3D, asked me about:
- a nice seamless player on linux (blender -a and djv) , and:
- how to change framerate on the blender player.
I searched for docs, but didn’t find any, so I asked Ton on IRC for the source file for the player ( it’s playanim.c ), and I also looked at the output of blender –help. This is what I found out:
From blender –help:
- blender -a -f fps fps-base filename.extension gives you a starting framerate – I think fps-base should be set to 1 unless you want ntsc where it is 30 and 1.001 (the default is 25 1)
- blender -a -p x y gives you a coord for the lower left corner of the window
- blender -a -m prevents buffering (reads each image from disk- you probably don’t want this?)
- You can also use -s startframe and -e endframe
Looking through playanim.c gave me the following things you can press while the player is playing:
- a toggles skip/noskip frames
- p toggles pingpong mode (plays forward then back etc/
- shift / key displays info in the terminal
- / plays at 5 fps
- left arrow goes a frame back *
- shift left arrow goes to the first frame *
- right arrow goes a frame forward *
- shift right arrow goes to the last frame *
- down arrow goes back 10 frames *
- shift down arrow goes back 1 frame and prints info on the window *
- up arrow goes 10 frames forward *
- shift up arrow goes 1 frame forward and prints info on the window *
- dragging the left mouse across the frame scrubs the animation (the left is first frame, the right is the last frame ) *
- shift = key does something I don’t understand (presumably adds a pause frame) and prints pause: number of times you pressed it
- = key speeds it up
- shift – key works the reverse of shift = key
- - key slows it down
- numpad enter pauses (like return)
- not quite sure what numpad . does
- numpad 1 plays at 60 pfs
- numpad 2 plays at 50 fps
- numpad 3 plays at 30 fps
- shift numpad 4 plays 24 fps
- numpad 4 plays 25 fps
- numpad 5 plays 20 fps
- numpad 6 plays 15 fps
- numpad 7 plays 12 fps
- numpad 8 plays 10 fps
- numpad 9 plays 6 fps
- numpad + zooms in
- numpad - zooms out
- esc quits
Another nice option is djv ( http://djv.sourceforge.net )
* these options pause the player in addition to their stated effect
20-12-2008 at 9:35 pm
Don’t forget the -j option, to playback stepped animations (animations rendered skipping frames):
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Rendering#Step_Render_Frame
Cheers
22-12-2008 at 5:34 am
Yep… this flipbook feature is really awesome in Blender.
I frequently find myself using Blender for different things than the usual 3D. Will I start using it for text processing and web browsing?
Cheers
28-12-2008 at 11:06 pm
yay! I find myself really often opening video files with the BlenderPlayer instead of other players, the great frame navigation it has and the “click-n-drag on the video to seek” feature is something I can’t still find in other videoplayers on linux.
/me hopes some kind of GSoC or something brings Audio support to the BlenderPlayer, someday…
29-01-2009 at 7:41 am
I use mplayer (whithout gui) to play almost everything. For image sequences (i.e. for all PNGs in the current dir):
mplayer mf://*.png -fps 30
Default fps is 25
29-01-2009 at 1:44 pm
mplayer, vlc, etc all can play image sequences, however, mplayer is not that good for an animation viewer- you can’t scrub really well for instance, while blender gives you smooth frame by frame scrubbing.
12-07-2009 at 2:03 pm
nice post! the only thing i miss is sound. but blenderplayer seems very suitable for any animation project!
another option is vlc, the first major version, vlc 1.0.0, has a frame by frame control. i also find useful this nice features:
* loop play from A to B marks
* video effects like rotation and ghost view of previous frames, combined with slow motion play (minus sign key)