Maya camera to Moho camera script?

kdiddy13 · Post by **kdiddy13** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 7:30 pm

Hey all you scripting geniuses. I have a challenge (ie. I'd love to have this tool, but don't have the time/knowledge to pull it off).

How about a Maya camera to Moho camera script/converting tool? Why Maya? 1) I use it (just being honest), as do many schools, and businesses in the entertainment industry. 2) Other programs, most notably After Effects, amongst others like Boujou, RealViz's suite of programs, Shake and Combustion, have adopted it as a sort of "standard" of importing and exporting 3d cameras, meaning it doesn't just benefit Maya users. 3)Maya's ASCII files are relatively straight forward for decrypting and doing exactly this sort of thing. 4) If you can get it to work with something as "popular" as Maya, creating one for other aps like Blender, Lightwave, or 3D Studio probably wouldn't be far behind. 5) You'd be a hero in my and the eye's of thousands of others!

This would allow for your 2d work to be able to be composited into your complex 3d animations (or Match Moved live action) in After Effects or your favorite compositing program with minimal fuss. It would also enable better camera controls in programs that specialize in 3D animation before exporting to Moho.

As to the how? Hmmm. I imagine it would be a stand-alone converter app (maybe integrated later into the Moho interface). I could possibly help do reasearch on what information a Maya camera includes, as well as example files. As far as writing the translator, I may be nearly useless. But I'll do what I can if someone is interested in writing something like this.

Thanks for listening.

Kurt
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Dodge Rampage

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 5:59 am

Looking at a few other conversion scripts for Maya, it doesn't actually look all that hard, and could certainly be done in Lua. As a matter of fact, I think I'll give it a shot. I don't have Maya, so If you don't mind you'd have to test it out. The coding is fairly straightforward, the only question is how the numbers would be scaled or rotated to make Maya happy.

I found a XSI to Maya script that exports a Camera Curve file, and I don't think it could be more straightforward. I'll give it a shot and you can test it out. I had wanted to do something like this to import Terragen camera paths, so this should be good practice.

--Brian

kdiddy13 · Post by **kdiddy13** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 2:59 pm

That would be awesome. Let me know how I can help out.

I am curious to see what will happen with scale. Moho seems to do an awful lot in a very small amount of space. Typically, I've used Maya as 1 unit = 1 foot, when in actuallity it Maya considers it 1cm. This arbitrary use of units really isn't a big deal until you get into dynamics, and even then you can get around it with a little math. So I imagine once we (er, that is you) figure out how to bring a camera in, it may be a relatively simple matter to scale the values to fit in Moho's world space (or just learn to animate in a much bigger world).

One more question (and I hope I don't kill the deal by being greedy), how hard would it be to get a Moho camera out to Maya?
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Suzuki twin specifications

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 3:38 pm

Okee dokee- up in another thread. If we can nail the numbers down, I don't see any problem running it in the other direction. I'd hardly have to change the script. Once this one is nailed down I'll whip it up. I couldn't believe how simple it was in the end. If I could just stop making a million stupid syntax errors...

--Brian