Implementing RV in Maya as a Sequence Viewer

You migth wonder how the hack maya can call RV to play the image sequence right after the playblast. It is quite simple. You have to set it in the Preferences window (Window menu / Settings/Preferences / Preferences).

Below the Image Sequence in the left text field enter the file path of the rvpush.exe. The Optional Flags should be this:

-tag playblast merge %f

Source

RV Player - Comparing Images

As we all know Tweaksoftware's RV is more than "just" an image sequence viewer. We can compare images with wipes. If we open an image sequence and drop another image sequence on  RV it shows up an option to add as a source to the session or as a layer.

In this case we add as a source. We can find out whats going on the background if we switch to stack mode (X hotkey). Double click on Defaul Stack enables to view the two (or more) image sequences in the same time. Of course they overlap each other so we have to activate wipes by pressing F6.

Now we can grab any part of the frame of the image to crop and see what's going on behind it. Below the Inputs tab we can change the order of the image sequences. That basically means the top sequence in the list is on the top of the screen as well. I put two different image sequence in RV to demonstrate the wipe/crop.

Pressing F7 displays the Info Stirp which is helpful to infidelity the image sequences.

RV is so sophisticated even if the sequences have different start frames it can be corrected by one click (actually it is two). In stack mode on Edit tab there is an option Align Start Frames. If it is turned on all image sequences will start on the same frame.

Customizing RV player - Sequence From File

As a world famous image viewer and sequence player Tweaksoftware's RV has to be revealed. There are several option usually have to set.

First of all Sequence From File option which can be set on Preferences / Packages is to allow RV to grab an image sequence from a directory rather than a single frame.

The default option to grab sequence is to drop the folder on RV. If the folder contains more than one image sequence RV paste them on the timeline following each other.
If we use another software to view still images (my personal preference is IrfanView) we have to run RV other way. However we don't want to do it every time from the Desktop or Start Menu. It is much easier to put RV icon on the Total Commander toolbar. In this case drag and drop works fine.