Create an animated image plane

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

Tip: To create an image sequence, you can Render a sequence of frames interactively or batch render. Alternatively, you can Playblast an animation.

To create an animated image plane using an image sequence

  1. From the panel menus, select View > Image Plane > Import Image.
  2. Browse to select the first file in your image sequence and click Open.
  3. Select the image plane.
  4. 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 to animate your image sequence with "non-standard" logic, you can 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.

    Alternatively, you can remove the expression from the Image Number attribute and set key frames on the Image Number attribute just like you would animate any other attribute. This way, you can animate the sequence with more complex logic such as reversing the image sequence or holding the first frame, then "playing" and then holding the last frame.

  5. Playback the scene to view your animated image plane in the background.
    6. Note: If you change the image used in a sequence, the Use Image Sequence option is also disabled as a result, and any keys set on the Image Number attribute are lost.

You can also assign a movie file to an image plane to create an animated image background; however, using an image sequence is recommended because not all movie file formats are readable in Maya’s image planes. For example, on Windows, only .avi files are accepted.

To create an animated image plane using a movie file

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

To add file formats

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

Related topics

Parent topic: Image planes