Maya camera import into AE for show intro. Help! I’ve tried everything.

[Paul Carlin]

What Scott means is that you create an expression for both the scale and position parameters of any 3D layers in your comp. For example, I will explain for novice users:

1) Create a solid that is 100×100 pixels.
2) Make it a 3D layer by checking the 3D Layer Checkbox.
3) Hit P and Shift-S to open the Position and Scale parameters.
4) Alt-Click the animation stopwatch for position to create an expression. Keep the default expression (which says that the value of the parameter is itself) and simply add a /100 (divide by 100) to the end of the existing expression. Type Right-arrow / 100 and Hit the numeric-keypad enter to finish. The expression should read “transform.position/100”
5) Do the same for Scale. “transform.scale/100”

Now whenever you drag the values for position and scale, the object will move 1/100th the distance that it did before, making the placement of objects more feasable. The value shown while dragging is the actual parameter value before the expression. Once you release the mouse button, the expression kicks in and the value turns red.

You can still animate and do everything you did before as usual.

My ideal solution to this problem would be a script that changes the camera parameters and null tracker positions to a more usuable “world” instead of this miniscule environment we live in now.

[Carlos Sandoval]

Ha, I just bumped into this problem, 3 years after your post, this MIGHT JUST BE TOO LATE, but anyhow, for future people having this problem of the exported camera from Maya to After Effects:

In Maya, pull up the camera attributes, under Film Back, Fit Resolution Gate, select Vertical. Never use Fill, or you’ll have swimming nulls in AE. I don’t know why it works for me, but it does. It can drive anyone mad.

If this doesn’t solve your problem, good luck.