Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 5.5 Help Manual page 391

Adobe After Effects Help
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(5.5) 3D Compositing
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:
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 compo-
•
sitions. One composition, which retains the name of the Maya project prefixed by the
word "Square," is a square-pixel-based composition containing the camera data. The
second, or parent, composition is a nonsquare-pixel-based composition that retains the
dimensions of the original file and contains the square-pixel composition.
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 ortho-
graphic 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.
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