Importing camera data from Maya files
You can now import the camera data from Maya ASCII project files (.ma). After Effects imports these files as compositions. For each Maya file, After Effects creates either one or two compositions: When you import a Maya file with a 1-node camera, After Effects creates a camera in the square composition that carries the camera's focal length, film size, and transformation data. If 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 composition. The parent node contains only the camera's transformation data. Once you import the Maya data, work with 3D layers and square-pixel footage in the square-pixel composition. Work with all nonsquare footage in the parent composition. Note: After Effects reads only the rendering cameras in Maya files and ignores the orthographic and perspective cameras. Therefore, always generate a rendering camera from Maya, even if it is the same as the perspective camera. The animation information for the Maya cameras must be "baked." This means that there should be a keyframe at each frame of the animation. There can be 0, 1, or K keyframes for each camera or transform parameter, where K is a fixed number. For example, if a parameter is not to be animated, the animator will either set no keyframes for this parameter or one keyframe, at the start of the animation. If a parameter has more than one keyframe, then it must have the same number as any other animation parameter with more than one keyframe. Reduce import time by creating or saving the most simple Maya file possible because After Effects reads the entire file to find the camera transformations that can be imported. In Maya, delete static channels before baking to reduce keyframes, and save a trimmed-down version of the Maya project (containing the camera animation only) before importing it into After Effects. 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 the above mentioned unsupported flags, and no warnings or error messages appear. |