MAYA TO SHAKE!

[Landon]

Anyone out there got a lead on a script to take you Maya camera to shake...
thanks

[Aruna]

Hmm.. What are you trying to accomplish? The maya camera is 3D, and shake works in 2D space.

[vuzz]

I remember seeing a post for this on highend2D, give ity a try, studios had scripts writen just for this. The last place I worked had one and it put the camera move info into a 3D node, wish I had it now. Good luck and if you find it let us know.

v

[Landon]

Well aruna Basially I'm working on a shot were a camera flys over an exploding planet as it leaves frame. Now what I'm trying to do is track a 2d matte painting of stars to match the camera move so that it looks like the camera is moving and not the stars. Now I have tacking balls that where given to me from maya. But the sequence is Huge 1400 frame composite. So the balls leave frame and the next one pop's up. So I'm have trouble because I have to re-reference my track every 25 frames, thus this creates a spicking effect in the track. Now I removed this spiking by going and translating the keyframes on the tracker into place everytime there was a spike.
Now that seemed to work but there was overlapping and it was just turning into a night mare, because there were so many keyframes. Hey another question for you is how come there is know simplify curve in Shake I think that this would be a great help, I know you can smooth your curves but it does not remove keyframes. Anyways I'm rambbling on here just frustrated right now...
thanks

[vuzz]

yes you can simplify the curve both smooth get rid of keys and much more, in the curve editor when you choose curve procesing go with resample, this is all in the Docs with examples.

I hope it helps

v

[Landon]

Really is this is 2.5 or only 3.0

[vuzz]

ya sorry for that omision, thats with the latest update 3.01

I was thinking of a few things and maybe averaging 2 tracks or setting a few track point yourself then telling shake to refrence those while tracking.

v

[Landon]

Yeah I know about that but i was looking for something more along the lines of the simplify curve in Maya...
thanks

[Aruna]

Actually, you can do it in shake 2.5. It's not called resample, it's called smooth, and is accessible under the view curve area. You have to make sure a curve is selected, and just hit apply to curve.

[Landon]

Thanks Aruna I will look at this again but I'm pretty much positive that this does not remove keys frames. It interpolates the gaps betweens keys and smooths those. I was looking for something to simplify the curve.

[arvid]

You're talking about different things here boys

Resample Vs. cleanup Vs. smoothing

• Resample takes samples of the interpolated animation at every n:th frame and adds keyframes
• Cleanup does the opposite as it tries to simplify a dense curve (such as tracking and mocap data) while retaining the motion
• Smoothing evens out the spikes, sort of like a median or blur filter

[Landon]

I dont know Arvid but I thought that I was pretty specific on what I said.... my apologies if amix the replies terms were missmatched. I want to SIMPLIFY a curve in SHAKE. I want to take the existing curve and simplify the amount of keys on it 'the same movement but less keys'. I know that you can average the curve with another but that is not what I need to do. Plus I must have another curve that is similiar.
if you have any insight on this Arvid that would be Great...
thanks

[arvid]

Yep I know what you're saying, but the terms got mixed up. What you want is cleanup. Shake can't do cleanup like that, but with some expressions you should be able to control the curve on a higer level, ie get a new much simpler curve which will let you deform the dense one, don't have it in my head atm tho. I'll look into it when I have some time over

[Landon]

Thanks Arvid... that's what I ended up doing I created a Local Variable based on the original curve and then I added keys to that curve and controlled it that way.
Later

[arvid]

Yep thats it, it's a nice trick