Baking and importing maya data – Adobe After Effects CS4 User Manual
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USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Importing and managing footage items
Last updated 12/21/2009
2
Choose Animation
> Keyframe Assistant > RPF Camera Import.
Note: To create an RLA or RPF file with the camera data in 3D Studio Max, save your rendering in RPF format with
Coverage, Z Depth, and Alpha Channels enabled.
More Help topics
Cameras, lights, and points of interest
Baking and importing Maya data
After Effects imports camera data from Maya project files. Before importing Maya camera information, you need to
bake it. Baking camera data makes animating with keyframes easier later in your project. Baking places a keyframe at
each frame of the animation. You can have 0, 1, or a fixed number of keyframes for each camera or transform property.
For example, if a property is not animated in Maya, either no keyframes are set for this property or one keyframe is set
at the start of the animation. If a property has more than one keyframe, it must have the same number as all of the other
animation properties with more than one keyframe.
Reduce import time by creating or saving the simplest Maya file possible. In Maya, reduce keyframes by deleting static
channels before baking, and save a version of the Maya project that contains the camera animation only.
Note: The following transformation flags are not supported: query, relative, euler, objectSpace, worldSpace,
worldSpaceDistance, preserve, shear, scaleTranslation, rotatePivot, rotateOrder, rotateTranslation, matrix,
boundingBox, boundingBoxInvisible, pivots, CenterPivots, and zeroTransformPivots. After Effects skips these
unsupported flags, and no warnings or error messages appear.
By default, After Effects treats linear units specified in the Maya file as pixels.
You can import camera data from Maya project files (.ma) and work with the data as a single composition or two
compositions.
For each Maya file you import, After Effects creates either one or two compositions:
•
If the Maya project has a square pixel aspect ratio, After Effects creates a single, square-pixel composition
containing the camera data and transformations.
•
If the Maya project has a nonsquare pixel aspect ratio, After Effects creates two compositions. The first
composition, which has a filename prefixed by Square, is a square-pixel composition containing the camera data.
The second, or parent, composition is a nonsquare-pixel composition that retains the dimensions of the original
file and contains the square-pixel composition. When working with imported camera data, use 3D layers and
square-pixel footage in the square-pixel composition, and use all nonsquare-pixel footage in the containing
composition.
When you import a Maya file with a 1-node camera, After Effects creates a camera in the square-pixel composition
that carries the camera’s focal length, film size, and transformation data.
When you import a Maya file with a 2-node or targeted camera, After Effects creates a camera and an additional parent
node in the square-pixel composition. The parent node contains only the camera’s transformation data. After Effects
imports 2-node cameras automatically with the locator node as the point of interest, with the Auto-Orientation option
of the camera set to Orient Towards Point Of Interest.
After Effects doesn’t read 3-node cameras.