I’ve been working on updating our animation library tool at work for use in Maya 2012 and noticed an issue with properly generating thumbnails. After scouring the internet for awhile, I found out I wasn’t the only one experiencing an issue with the playblast command. When using the completeFilename flag (to save an image without zero-padding), the image won’t save, and Maya raises no warnings or errors about it.
Fortunately, I came across a post from Nathan Horne, showing how to generate thumbnails using the Maya API commands. I added some additional checks to the original snippet:
def writeThumbnailFromView(filename, compression, modelPanel=None):
#Import api modules
import maya.OpenMaya as api
import maya.OpenMayaUI as apiUI
#Grab the last active 3d viewport
view = None
if modelPanel is None:
view = apiUI.M3dView.active3dView()
else:
view = apiUI.M3dView()
apiUI.M3dView.getM3dViewFromModelEditor(modelPanel, view)
#read the color buffer from the view, and save the MImage to disk
image = api.MImage()
view.readColorBuffer(image, True)
image.writeToFile(filename, compression)
So far it seems more efficient for my needs than the playblast command, as my tool is now able to avoid capturing the wrong viewport, and I can control the image without messing with render settings.
sergiosykes(dot)com 
Hi , thats a cool pieace of code, but…..
what would happen if i wanted to make sure the capture width and height were as the render globals.
the main disadvantage i find in this method is that every capture is different then the other according to your UI layout sizes and the active screen size…
can u capture with api and maintain a snapshot of a certain size??
I use this function to capture from modelViews within my own UIs. These modelViews are coded with a fixed size so I never addressed the issue you mentioned.
Off the top of my head, if you wanted to capture a fixed size from one of the normal viewPorts, I would look into making a temporary modelView in a separate window that’s resized to match the render globals.
thanks for the quick reply,
yes, it occurred to my after writing the question here that i can just create my own panel, i tested it out and of course it works nicely, but flickers for the panel creation in a not as elegant manner as before.
i think that when already using such an elegant approach (background api) i thought there might be a way to hard-code the captures virtual h/w .
also another disadvantage, and again , im only referring to my setup here…
theoretically if i needed the capture to be at full scale from the render globals lets say 2k and my screen would not support such resolution , i would not be able to do a snapshot that size.
still, its an awesome way . thanks for posting it and for the quick reply