Most times before you go to render a final sequence of images, you’re going to want to render out a preview animation. Preview
animations allow you to test your animation and make sure that everything works properly before committing to a final render. In this lesson we’re
going to create a preview rendering in order to be able to see the camera motion in real time. Let’s open a file, from the application drop down menu,
choose open, navigate to the chapter six folder, and open the file ch06_façade03.max. The file opens to the front view of our building façade; if
we scrub the timeline you’ll see that we have a 100 frame camera animation. We want to preview this animation without doing a full render to make sure
that the animation of the camera is the way that we want it to be. To create a preview animation, click on the tools menu, put your cursor over the grab
viewport option, and choose the “create animated sequence file” from the grab viewport fly out menu. This opens the make a preview dialog box. We’re
first going to look in the preview range section. We have two options we can use; the current active time segment or a custom range to be able to
render out a specific range of frames as a preview. In this case were going to keep the active time segment option selected. In the frame rate section,
we’re going to render every frame so we’ll leave the every nth frame equal to one. And since we’re rendering this for video and not for film we want to
keep the playback frames per second at 30. Since this is a preview render we don’t need to see the full size of the image to test out the animation, keep
the percent of output value set to 50%. This will use half the resolution of our current active final resolution to create the preview. In the display filter
area, uncheck all the options except for geometry. We just want to render only the geometry in the scene. If we’re editing after we render this preview,
sometimes it’s a good idea to have the frame number and the camera name embedded into the image. In the overlay section check the frame
numbers option and check the camera / view name option. In the visual style area, click the down arrow on the right hand side of the rendering level drop
down list, and choose a realistic from the drop down list. This will render the frame using the realistic viewport rendering settings. In the output
section, click on the codec option for the AVI selection. In the video compression dialog box that opens, choose the Microsoft video one
compressor from the compressor drop down list. This is a codec that is used to compress the video so we can play back as an animation. We’ll leave
all the other settings at their default, and click OK to close the dialog. We want to make sure that were rendering the camera one view port. Now that we
have all our parameters set, click the create button to create the preview animation. You’ll see 3DS Max running through the frames of the timeline
while it creates the preview animation file. When it completes the file, it will open up the appropriate media player and play it back. In this case it opens
up windows media player and as you can see it plays the scene back in real time, and has used the realistic shading settings. Creating the preview
animation can be a critical step in the success of your animation. I recommend that you make it part of your production pipeline. It is not only a great
visualization tool but it can help reduce the amount of rerendering you have to do because of animation issues. Go ahead and press control S
to save the file.