Create an animated image plane

You can assign an image sequence or a movie file to an image plane in order to create an animated image background in your scene.

Tip: One simple way to create a movie or image sequence in Maya is to Playblast an animation.

To create an animated image plane using a movie file

From the panel menus, select View > Image Plane > Import Movie.
Browse to select a movie file and click Open.
Playback the scene to view your animated image plane in the background.

To create an animated image plane using an image sequence

From the panel menus, select View > Image Plane > Import Image.
Browse to select the first file in your image sequence and click Open.
Select the image plane.
In the Attribute Editor, turn on Use Image Sequence.
This automatically enters an expression (=frame) into the Image Number attribute. The Image Number is equal to the Time Slider’s current frame.

If you want non-standard animated image sequence logic, you can either edit the expression on the Image Number attribute (right-click Image Number and select Edit Expression) and enter the desired changes. For example, if you wanted to slow down the image sequence to "playback" at half speed you could add a divide by 2 to the expression.

Alternately, you can remove the expression from the Image Number attribute and set key frames on the Image Number attribute just like animating any other attribute. This allows for complex image sequence logic, for example reversing the image sequence or holding the first frame, then "playing" then holding the last frame.
Playback the scene to view your animated image plane in the background.

Note: Changing an image used in a sequence in the Attribute Editor disables the Use Image Sequence option, and any keys set on the Image Number attribute are lost.

To add file formats

Find the getFileSequenceFormats.mel file in the ..\Scripts\Others folder of your Maya installation directory.

Create an animated image plane

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