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just about got it! need help with maya camera import
ok, sorry for the long post. i have been slugging my way through getting a maya camera imported to ae and i am so close! i have coms so far that i need your help to get the last bug worked out.
i’m using maya 6 and ae 5.5 pro. mac os 10.3.9. i have made a cube with 3 locators and the camera does a 360 around the cube. i have my maya scene with three locators all named using the null_xxxx format that are placed on 3 corners of the cube. the camera is baked, under render globals, i have used the CCIR 601/Quantel NTSC preset (720×486, device aspect ratio=1.333, pixel aspect ratio=0.9). i save the maya file as a .ma and bring it into after effects, it come in as 2 comps – maya cube test and square maya cube test. “square maya cube test” conatins the tree nulls and the camera from maya. “maya cube test” contains the “”square maya cube test” (i don’t understand what this is for). then i render out a tiff sequence of the animation in maya, and import the sequence into ae and bring it into the “square maya cube test” comp. the nulls don’t appear to have the scaling issue that i hear so much about. and at first glance, everything seems to work, but the tiff sequence and the nulls don’t quite line up. not just offset, because the distance changes between the locator and cube corners slightly. it looks like the cameras have different focal lengthsm but i checked the ae camera and made it so that the field of view and focal length matches the ae camera (with ae using mm as units) but it’s still off.
what am i missing?
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6 Replies
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Never worked with Maya
but off the top of my head: recalculate the focal length to what it would be in Square pixels and try that.
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Mr. Binks,
Real 3D space happens in the “Square” world. The non square world is for the video renders. So in AE bring in your rendered video from Maya and put them into the “Cube test” comp. They are non square (.9) so they need to live in there. BUT! Everything you add in AE needs to live in the Square comp.
So say you have a text layer that says “Front” and a text layer that says “Back”. And as you may guess, front needs to be in front of the cube and back needs to be behind the cube.
You would actually have to duplicate the square comp. One of the square comps goes on top of the Maya cube renders (in the non-sqaure comp). and the other goes below it in the layer stack. In the top square comp, go inside it and add your “Front” text pickwhipped to the null that lives on the front corner. So the front text has the same position.
Then do the same for the square comp below the cube and pickwhip it to the null from the back part of the cube.
So your layer stack will be:
1. Maya cube test Sqaure comp (add front AE layers inside here)
2. Cube test render video from Maya
3. Maya cube test Sqaure comp (add Behind AE layers inside here)Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
thanks chris, that makes a whole lot of sense. and it looks better, but it still doesn’t line up perfectly. the horizontal seems good, but the vertical is a little off sometimes. any ideas?
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I don’t off the top of my head. I can tell you that if things are done right, everything should line up without futzing with it. So if you’re messing with unlocking the scale and ditorting the layer size…well..you shouldn’t have to. I’ve done it a handful of times and it locks perfectly. However as you may find out, the scale between AE and the default units of Maya are off by like a factor of 100.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
chris do you ever render out a square pixel sequence, or is do just do th enon-square and deal with the two comps?
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assuming that your output system (NLE?) is based on non-square pixels, you render out from the non-square comp. Really your non-square comp is your working comp. The square comp is so that the Maya data can match with an AE camera. But the square comp get’s streched to .9 to match your Maya renders (.9).
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com
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