importing motion paths from maya to after effects
by Faye Greenwood
on
Nov 16, 2005 at 10:19:55 am
I need to take an object from maya that is animating within 3d space and use Particular to create a nice sparkly trail. Is there a way of importing the motion path from maya so I can use the z depth information rather than keyframe it manually? I don't think a depth matte will work as I need to animate it to an actual point. The camera is basically locked off so importing camera data will not help.
Cheers
Faye
Re: importing motion paths from maya to after effects by Chris Smith on Nov 16, 2005 at 2:35:27 pm
Yes! AE will import .ma files. It's too much for me to explain here from scratch, but search the Cow archives and google for the details of getting an .ma into AE.
What you will want to do in Maya is point constrain a null to your moving object. Then bake the keyframes of that null. Then rename the null "null_particles" so AE will create it's own null to match the movements. You just need to stick to the naming convention "null_***". This way AE will create it's own null to match.
Then in AE you can link the position of the null to the position of the Particular emitter.
