Tag: 3ds Max

Cloudy Saturday

Oh yes I’m here. It’s been a while not having posts here. Life is like repeating itself when writing various tools for 3ds max. Maxscript has “interesting” design which take me longer to make usable things.

I picked up simple TCL and python for building tools in nuke & nuke studio. TCL is a terrible language to me at the beginning. I wish I was a hard-core programmers then I might get it to work quicker. Inserting and reading custom metadata in DPX is another “old” problem I’m about to tackle finally in the last few weeks.

And it’s embarrassing to tell that I’m learning to use git for my codes recently, before they got messed up too much. http://www.gitlab.com seems like a popular choice.

Sound boring. Hopefully got some visual stuff to share later.


Maya camera shake

Recently i discover the shake attribute under the camera shape node https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AS1PJlcHAE.

In the old days cheating in AE was enough. But it comes up right in time since my aerial shots on hands need plenty of shaking. An easy shaking control in 3d might be better. I use them with expression and custom attributes for keyable magnitude and frequency. To send the shake to 3ds Max my first idea was to bring the shake back to 3d. The shakeHorizontal and shakeVertical values are transferred to tx, ty of an extra locator on top the camera.

The result look fine in general, but not when object goes very far or close. The shake is constant in 2d but not with perspective. Thus I’m thinking about the other method, putting the shake into AE.

I did a quick test and it seems to work. Copy the baked shakeHorizontal and shakeVertical keys of original camera to tx ty of a dummy camera. It should be a locator actually but AE recognizes keys on camera only. Export the dummy camera as .ma and import into AE. Create a null object / solid layer, use expression to get the keys and scale it up about 100 times. Parent any comp to this layer to get the shake.

Not 100% sure but i will tell if it really works.