In today’s competitive marketplace, studios are snowed under with portfolio entries. There are simply far to many artists fighting for very few positions. The answer is clear, if you want to get hired in this industry, you need to rethink your strategy and promote yourself in new ways.
Enter: The handheld video age. One of the newest methods for getting seen at the moment is, believe it or not, via the cell phone. The following is an excerpt from a discussion on getting a job at Crytek.
“Someone I met recently had his [demo] reel on his cell phone. It was really awesome to start up a conversation with someone and start talking about 3d and be able to see a reel mid conversation, really great idea I thought… you never know who might be sitting next to you at the bar having a drink.”
Touche. If you want to get noticed, you need get seen. Obviously iPods aren’t cell phones but I’m sure you get the idea. Speaking to someone face-to-face is far more personal than sending a link over the internet, and you are far more likely to get a call back.
In this tutorial, I’ll be covering the steps to render an animation to your iPod. To demonstrate, I’ll be rendering this simple fluid sim animation, but feel free to use whatever you like.
Render settings
Before rendering your animation it’s important to keep in mind that the maximum resolution an iPod is capable of playing is 640 x 480. The actual resolution of the screen is only 320 x 240, but it helps to upload the maximum incase you connect it to your TV.
So go ahead and set the dimensions of your animation to 640 x 480 and your output format to PNG.
This will export each frame as a separate PNG and place it in your output folder which by default is /tmp but you can change that by clicking the folder icon in the output panel.
When you are ready hit the big ANIM button (or press Ctrl + F12). When your animation has finished you should see each frame saved as a separate file in your specified folder.
Now to put all those loose frames into a single mov file…
Compiling the movie
To compile all our frames into a single video file we are going to make use of the Video Sequence editor. So with our blend file still open, change the 3d viewer window to Video Sequence Editor 
In the new window, click Add>Images 
Navigate to where you saved your frames and select every frame but holding down your right mouse button as you drag over them. Files will turn purple once they are selected. Once you’ve done that, hit ‘Select Images’.
You will now be taken back to the editor screen where you will see a purple box with a number underneath it. This is your timeline which contains all your frames. The number underneath is the frame that you will start the timeline at. Move the bar to frame 1.
In your render settings panel, change the output format from PNG to Quicktime. We also need to change the codec settings, so click Set Format.
In the window that opens next, you will need to set the compression type to MPEG-4, because it appears to be the only codec type that the iPod actually recognizes. H.264 does not work.
Go ahead and change the settings as follows:
Finally we need to click the Do Sequence button in your Scene panel (f10).
This will tell blender to follow the instructions in the sequence editor instead of rendering our scene.
Now all you need to do is hit the big ANIM button again. This will open the render window which will quickly compile all our frames into a neatly packed .mov file
Importing into iTunes
Open iTunes and click the Movies tab
Import the file by going to File>Add File to Library…
Navigate to where you saved your .mov file and click Open.
Connect your iPod and bobs your uncle!
So there you have it! A powerful promoting tool that tucks nicely in your pocket but can be whipped out at a moments notice. This will no doubt give you an advantage at the next Siggraph conference!
If you have an animation you have previously rendered, but would like to put on your iPod, I would highly recommend you use the open source program MediaCoder which will convert it to the correct format.
Do you know of any other unique ways to promote your work? Write it in the comments below!
Nice, but you need a tutorial on how to make that fluid sim thing! It’s just to awesome!
Very nice! I have been doing this myself for a while, only I used the ffmepg output in blender instead of the quicktime one. It’s open source you know
!
What fluid settings did you use for the animation? And how did you get the ice cubes to interact with the fluid like that? Thanks and great job!
Couldn’t you just have Blender save it as an AVI Raw file? It does the same thing with fewer steps (it doesn’t make all of those individual frames). Plus, you can save it as an .mp4 file later.
@TwilightXIII No!! In my opinion the AVI Raw file should actually be removed from rendering options. It corrupts frequently, isn’t lossless (bad quality) and can’t be cancelled once you start rendering the animation. ALWAYS render to PNG (or jpegs for test anims). It gives you a LOT more freedom.
And if you are worried about not being able to see the animation immediately after rendering, press the PLAY button (below the ANIM button). This takes the numbered frames and plays it as a video. You can even adjust the speed while it’s playing by using the numpad keys! (1-9)
@Craigsnedeker & @Ryan I might do a fluid tutorial later on. The icecubes were actually just obstacles which I parented to an empty and keyframed to move along the Z axis at frame 150. Not as technical as it looks! ;P
Andrew, can I save an animation as quicktime and then convert it to an MP4 in iSquint, then just put it on my iPod?
Hi Andrew, sounds great, but just wondering why you don’t render your animated scene straight into a quicktime file?
Why render individual images and then create a quicktime?
Is the quality effected or something?
mm. thank you
nice! i’m gonna make my own blog
This was great, but I can’t believe you have three iPods!
Thanks for the tutorial. I tried it in Blender 2.5 Alpha but it keeps playing it backwards. Can you help?
I’ve rendered straight to mp4, and it works great for me.
my movie just comes out black the whole way thru
Andrew, if your are reading this then I want to ask you to translate this in to 2.5, is there any possible way?
Thanks!
Missxu
Nice,
I didn’t know you could do it in Blender. I’ve been rendering to jpegs then using photoshop to “Save for web” as an animated gif. This seems a lot easier!