importing Renderings from Maya

[Alon_a]

PNG is quite safe. You don’t lose image quality and you can keep the alpha channel if there is one (and there probably is, unless you have some background plane in Maya). Make sure you render at full 32bit (24 color and 8 bit alpha) or “Millions+ of colors”, not sure how the setting is called in Maya’s renderer.

Don’t use JPEG or GIF. I think TIFF is also fine but I don’t tend to use it, out of habit. Be aware that a 720×480 image with much detail makes a pretty hefty PNG file, so if you’re rendering a 60sec animation at 30 fps you’re going to eat up A LOT of disk space. I think Maya also lets you output to Quicktime directly; if you use the Animation codec at full quality you should also do fine, the file may be large but you’ll have a single file instead of hundreds of images.

I prefer to render straight (rather than premultiplied), Mental Ray has a setting for it but I don’t know about Maya’s software renderer. In any event you should be able to import either a straight or a premult sequence into AE, just make sure you check the appropriate option when you import (AE may or may not guess correctly). Premultiplying and then compensating upon import entails some loss of color dynamic range at object fringes and highly transparent regions, but it’s usually not a major issue.

It’s always safe to render large, so you’ll have some headroom to play with, but if the Maya shots are well planned without too much wasted space you may not need to do that. It all just depends on the composition, hard to give a general answer. Just think what are the chances that you’ll need to enlarge and reposition the 3D shots within your comp.

Hope this helps.

AA

[Steve Roberts]

(caveat: I use Lightwave, not Maya)

Sounds fine, but unless Maya allows you to render in non-square pixels, you should render to a format which is 4×3. 720×480 in square pixels is not a good choice.

Choice A: Render to 720×540, then import the render and drag it into a 720×480 comp, scale it to 90%, assuming you haven’t rendered fields.
Choice B: Render to 648×486, import and drag into a 720×480 comp. No need to scale.

To see a discussion of this sort of thing, look for Rick Gerard’s “Dr. Strangepixel” tutorial in the COW.

If you want fields, I recommend rendering in maya at 60 fps or 59.94 if you can. Also I like rendering to a TGA sequence in the 3D app. Personally. 🙂