The ability to have Maya Cameras in After Effects has been available for a long time. However anyone who has successfully used this feature becomes immediately aware that there are a few steps required to get this information correctly into After Effects. Most artists don’t want to deal with or even think about these limitations and the steps required in Maya to make this transition easy. If you really want to know all the rules necessary skip to the bottom for a breakdown on how to manually do it.

I saved you all that technical headache. All that is required is 4 easy steps!

1. GOTO creativecrash.com and download my script

2. source AE.mel and run AE_UI;

2. Select the transform node of the desired camera, press “Bake  Selected Camera”.

3. Select any number of objects positions desired in After Effects and press Bake Selected Objects.

Decide How the Export Button works by checking or unchecking Import in After Effects. The script uses your current timeline length and has options to force a 1080 Camera. If Import doesnt work. Open the file with a texteditor and near line 111 look for the AppLocation_(YOUR OS) in quotation. Change this to your location.

BENEFITS OF USING THIS SCRIPT

If the names of the objects you bake stay the same, when you replace the nulls by pasting the new and deleting the old from your comp file in After Effects all work done in After Effects (expressing objects in After Effects to match the position of the object in Maya) would not have to be redone.

You can spend one and a half minutes of the 2 minutes your given to make a change, to actually make a change, instead of figure out why your change isnt working correctly!

If you use this script to bake a copy of the object, you can save the file and retain the original unbaked animation. This saves you the pain of accidentally saving a scene when you have baked the camera to export it only to find that you need to to change the camera.

REQUIRED RULES FOR ACCURATE AFTER EFFECT OBJECTS SAVED IN A MAYA ASCII FILE

All objects needed in After Effects:

1.  Must have a key for every frame. Bake all Channels in Graph Editor.

2.  Must not be grouped under anything (grouping changes world position when imported into After Effects). The workaround to this limitation is to create a locator that is point and orient constrained to the object and bake that object instead.

3. Must have the prefix  ”null” to  its name.

RECOMMENDED RULES

The World Scale of the scene to be imported should be set to millimeters, so that position and scale data in After Effects is 0-100 rather than 0.00 to 1.00.

If each of these renderlayers where individually saved to seperate files that the farm would render,  troubleshooting renders that have problems or layers that have changed would be possible. It is easier when each renderlayer for the scene is submitted by itself to help determine where the issue might be.

If SUBFOLDER is  blank it will deposit the files into the project/scenes/render folder.

• Turn on the layers that you want to create files for
• Enter SUBFOLDER location or leave blank for  project/scene/render
• Press EXPORT Button

This tool allows for complex relationships to be created by simple keyframing. In addition, it doesn’t limit you to one object.

In this example using one attribute “Wing Flap” , one is able to control three seperate objects, and two rotational axis. Wings typically flap in a circular motion, not just up and down both wings and the body. With another atttribute “Wing Speed”, controlled by an expression, you can animate the butterfly to fly with only one attribute.

Let’s go into more detail.
A common technique to animate a back and forward motion, ie. wings flapping, is to use sin in the expression. Pick an arbitrary number like 20. Creating set driven keys that drive the rotation of the wings up at 20 and down at -20.

Using this technique, the animatable attribute wing speed can be animated up and down making it easier for the animator to focus on one keyable attribute. One keyable attribute controlling at least 6 rotations of three different objects.

This may seem pretty simplistic in nature but you would be amazed how many animators wouldn’t or couldn’t set this initial control up.

Latest and Greatest Edit

Mac is great for what the general user wants to do  these day, ie. pictures, video, emailing internet activities, and the basic stuff. What about “Power User” functions such as ……….SHOW HIDDEN FILES. You think that Apple would have nailed down there operating system tools, but recently I came across this tool called Pathfinder which is far better than Apple’s Finder and the interface is the same. It has an option to show hidden files among other great things that I wish finder had. It costs 40$ but if you don’t feel like spending money for something that should be included, then open the terminal app and type the following

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Relaunch Finder (command+alt+esc)

 This caught my eye earlier this year and it stuck in the back of my head. I pondered how I would achieve this simple but amazing effect.

As they describe in there website they needed to have this effect accomplished in a way that allowed Discovery Channel to use it without a 3d app and swap the transition images out. They go on to say that mattes were created and it was  a heavy use of After Effects. Well it got me thinking about a way to rig  a grid of cubes in Maya that would produce a matte similar to this effect.

THE THEORY

If a cube with each perpendicular face shaded with a primary color and parallel face shaded the same were made into a grid of cubes that would rotate on the x axis, the resulting render image would produce an ID matte that would simulate that eye catching effect.The resulting mattes could be used in a compositing software to great effect!

THE PRACTICE

I immediatly thought about how a mel script  would rig the rotation of the cubes to the distance from a controller. This would allow for easily animating the controller and camera.

The controller will have a max and min distance of influence giving me the ability to control the effect.  Most 3d apps have a tool that returns the distance between two points. The only other nodes necessary for the effect is the setRange utility to remap the distance into ranges more conducive to rotation.

THE RESULT

This exercise has lay the foundation for a tool that I plan to call the “ Attribute Controller”.  This rig and script can be used to control any other attribute.  Here are some examples.

Cube Transition

Remove Edge from PSD people is similar to the remove matte feature in the Layer.. Matting menu except this brings up the feather options as well allowing removal of  edges from the  added layer. I found it useful as a quick and dirty way to remove premultiplication or back lighting  in some extreme cases when time was more important than quality.

In the Architectural World it is common to add images of people to 3d renders using various techniques. I have a group of actions that relate to tasks associated with entouraging or finishing 3d visualization imagery.

PSD Entouraging

Add Reflection takes the selected layer and mirrors it upside down allowing for fake reflections, it also asks for blurring and then you add opacity. Very useful, especially when your doing this for lots of people.

Add Shadow is the same as the Reflection actions except it makes the mirrored layer solid black for simulated shadows.

Hue + and - are usefull when you are trying to vary your vegetation. It simply add +10 or -10 to Hue, shifting the color.

ChannelManip

Cut Alpha

This script creates a layer from the background and cuts the alpha channel as a layer mask. I find this useful when I need to have the trasparancy from the alpha but want to modify in some way. I also some times embed material ID in alpha and use this action to cut a mask for a group. This would be useful for a glass ID where you add in effects to the glass of a rendering.

Channel Masks

Channel Masks is an action that makes use of and ID matte. An ID matte is a RGB image with only solid colors representing three different materials. It is a common practice in CG, and 3d apps allow for this kind of image render. This action selects the red, blue, and green channel and makes a mask from each of these channels groups them under a group. I also have separate actions for each channel individually in case you need it.

I am always amazed how people approach work on computers. I have found a real difficulty understanding why some people don’t want to find a ways of simplifying there life. It only takes a little bit of time to wrap your head around actions and how they are useful. That time spent using actions will quickly be made up the first time you need repeat a task more than once.

http://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion/bvh-conversion-release—motions-list has a list of all the available actions.

The data is hosted at The Trailers’ Park.
http://www.thetrailerspark.com/downloads/CMU/Library

Jennifer Sumbu Longe has converted the data,  into six other formats: .dae(Collada), .mb (Maya), .max (3ds Max), .vns(iClone), .bvh (iClone), and .fbx(Motion Builder, Maya, 3d Max, Modo,…).

A while ago, my wife mentioned an idea she had for an animation with the  theme  “You Are What You Eat”.  The  characters built out of objects like little vegetables and acting out different stylized sports actions. I searched for motion capture data that was available for free and stumbled into Carnegie Mellon’s database of motion capture database. Initially, I was excited to take some of these clips and apply them to rigged characters that were built out of vegetables and share the process. Looking deeper into the plan the CMU Database is in a format that is very obscure and I was interested in finding a way to get that data into Maya. There are several BVH converters for maya but ran into further difficulties with these scripts or plugins. Just last month I checked again and they are available in many formats now! I’m researching  the look of the characters using sprites of vegetables.

One of the main reasons I love Maya is that it is ultimately customizable!  You can do things like customize the interface, create custom buttons that automate common tasks. Even redesign default behaviors of materials or rearrange attributes of built in shaders so that the interface makes more sense to you the user. I have reorganized the attributes of the MIA_material into more intuitive locations.

Autodesk has been refining the attribute window, while mental images has been adding features, and they always seem to leave me a bit disappointed in the organization of these attributes.  Why aren’t all the reflection attributes in the same place? BDRF attributes have there own category, that falls after refraction and translucency falls after BDRF, not after refraction. This shader is hard enough to wrap your head around without have to hunt down were the settings are, or when you tweak reflections, to be scrolling up and down between BDRF falloff and reflectivity. I guess I’m just meticulous!

Called the Mentalray Architectural Shader, Mental Ray Developed the shader be used as a monolithic shader for use with hard surfaces. When I first started using the shader I was puzzled at the incredibly different approach that this shader takes compared to the classic Blinn, Phong or in simpler terms having different attributes for specularity and reflection. I was determined to wrap my head around this new thinking; “Reflection and Specularity are the same thing”. Specularity is just a glossy reflection.

I recommend reading the information available in the help section for mentalray on this awesome shader and encourage you to take the time to tackle some of the other workflow wrenches this shader throws at you, ie. tone mapping, gamma correction,  and upto 32 bit output. This shader has many fantastic features such as

• Optimized blurry reflections and refractions
• Ambient Occlusion with color bleeding
• Tweakable Facing Ratio Reflection (BDRF)

Here is the link for the updated mia_material_functions.mel.

mia_material_functions.mel

Replace the file in your scripts/others folder of your Maya installation. Make sure you save a backup in case you mess things up or don’t like the new layout.