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Maya camera import into AE for show intro. Help! I’ve tried everything.
I’m working on an intro for a BET religious broadcast, and I’m running into some problems importing my Maya camera into AE.
Basically I’ve created a 3d stage in Maya on which to place a tif sequence textured plane of the rotoscoped Pastor preaching. The camera follows the Pastor around, then pulls back to reveal the giant sea of crowd created via the particular plug-in in AE (thanks to the “belief” tutorial and my home made green screen.. hehe)
So obviously, I need to synchronize AE’s camera movement with Maya’s so as to seamlessly match the crowd plane into my 3d stage and Pastor scene. Here is a test render of the scene so as to better understand:https://www.whittierproductions.com/TF/ETCROWDTEST.mov
So as you can see, the AE elements in the scene, (the particle crowd and the background mountains) start to drift killing any chance of making this technical nightmare look semi-photorealistic.
I’ve created a simple test scene so as to validate that the AE camera is drifting. Here are examples of that scene:
https://www.whittierproductions.com/TF/MAYA_SS1.jpg
https://www.whittierproductions.com/TF/AE_SS2.jpg
https://www.whittierproductions.com/TF/AECAMTESTMAYA.mov
Once again the AE created solid plane starts to drift from the imported Maya scene.
I’ve tried the Creative Cow, Maya to AE camera import tutorial and I’ve searched and searched for posts all over the Maya and After Effects CC forums as well as others.. and out of all of that information this is the camera export import process that I’ve derived:
Maya
1. Make sure the Maya frame rate is set to NTSC 30 (windows – settings – preferences)
2. Make sure the Camera filmback setting is set to “horizontal” and not “fill”
3. Export the tif sequence using CCIR 601 Quantel NTSC (720×486)
4. Create locators and make sure that they are named with the prefix “null_”
5. Clear the scene so that only the locators and camera are left.
6. Bake the camera (Edit – Keys – Bake Simulation)
7. Save the newly created Maya file as ____FORAEIMPORT (.ma)
AE
8. Start up AE and import the .ma file
9. Two comps are created.. A square comp with the camera and locators (648×486) And a non-square comp with the square comp as one of its layers(720×486)
10. Import the tif sequence into the non-square comp.
11. Check to make sure the locators and camera data in the square comp are lining up with the tif sequence in the non-square comp. (They are.)
Now here is where everything goes terribly wrong.
12. Create a solid plane in the non-square comp and make it a 3d layer.
13. Now position the plane in the scene near the locators and scrub the time line to check for a match.
14. Image plane appears to drift around in the scene instead of locking into its correct 3d placement.
Any ideas as to what I’m doing incorrectly? Any help will be overwhelmingly appreciated.
thanks!!!!
Scott -
12 Replies
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try working in the sq comp and use the nonsquare comp for renders, (ie keep the plane in the sq pix comp)
who is that masked man…
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You should be doing all your work in the square pixel comp. (You might find my ‘3D_TrackedCamera_Preflight” script useful, maybe [available at crgreen.com].)
When you say “Now position the plane in the scene near the locators and scrub the time line to check for a match”, are you starting by using an existing position value and pasting it into the new 3D plane? -
Theres; no perfect way to get the maya camera into AE without 3rd party help. There is an Maya to AE plug-in called “MoCon” from a group called 3D mation (or 3Dmation), but I don’t know their site – so you have to do some searching. Maybe it will help.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911
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ive exported my cam and nulls from maya to AE more times then i can remember and never had a problem and never had to use a 3rd party helper.
heres the link you were talking about
https://www.3dmation.com/looks nice going from AE to maya, but why whould you need this going from MAYA to AFX?
who is that masked man…
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[rendernyc] “looks nice going from AE to maya, but why whould you need this going from MAYA to AFX?”
Maya units and AE units aren’t a perfect match, no matter what you do. So in very precise situations, it doesn’t work well. This solves for that issue.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911
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you can also just scale everything down by 100, which is what i did when importing maya cams recently. i just pasted an expression for divide by 100 into the scale and position parameters of all my layers. takes a while to set up, but it was easier than using the mo-con scripts, which we also investigated.
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Can you describe this process in detail? It would be really helpful to the community.
When you say scale everything down by 100 – what do you mean exactly?
Thanks.
Aharon
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com—————————————-
Click the link below to subscribe to the Creative Cow After Effects Podcast, and get free AE video tutorials:https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=111087911
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could you parent all to a null and then scale the null to 1%?
who is that masked man…
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well when i say “eveything” i mean everything except the camera. i just add /100 or /1000 as an expression of the scale property of every single 3d layer in the comp.
that way, when you scrub the slider for scale, you get finer adjustments. if you’re trying to scrub the scale slider from 1.02 to 1.05 then you’re in trouble. does that make sense? so you can scrub your whole hand back and forth without having the image leap from 100px of screen space to “so big i can’t see anything else”.
it’s irritating having a scene scale like this, but using the expression was a lot easier to work and live with than trying to wrangle maya into spitting out the correct scene scale.
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wow, picking up this thread almost a year later.
i totally understand where you are coming from as far as having do deal with miniscule values and the problems they cause, and how you are using your solution to make things easier to deal with.
but as aharon mentioned, due to differences in units, when you need things to be very precise they will not match.
since we started this thread, i did one project that relied heavily on 3d tracking in several programs where the data was then brought in to maya for cleanup and finessing. in almost every case where things lined up real well in maya, after importing the data in to afx there is a bit of error and that caused a slight drift that was unacceptable.
i did notice however, that when exporting a .ma file for ae directly from syntheyes (which is will give you an error if you try to read it in maya)it was very accurate.
after that experience i wound up using mocon on my next project that was done animated in maya with compositing of green screen elements in AE. the initial setup took a bit understand, but once that was done the results were fantastic. no drift. objects had pretty much the same coordinates in both ae and maya, so if you moved an object to 10 units in x in maya, you could even just go in to ae and move it the same 10 units and it would line up. you could obviously re-export the data if you wanted but there was no need.
also, when i would update the cameras animation in maya, i could simply export that data to a file and hitting a button in the mocon palette in ae would import the new camera.
i found it a very nice solution that was sooo much better than using these other workaround that is worth the little bit of extra time of set up.
who is that masked man…
https://www.exposedideas.com/
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