Maya to Combustion or shake ??

[rsalonen]

Hey, I would go for SGI output format when rendering. Also TIF works, but SGI is probably the best.
You then open these in either shake or combustion as a image sequence.
So in other words, all the frames will be rendered as files, you then import them in your composition software as a sequence.

[alexx]

i can only speak for shake so far.

but there i would recommend .iff format.
sgi is good as well, since it supports sub frame loading as well but iff files are compressed so you save a lot of space on your hard drive - and sub frame loading is possible as well (which means that if you do a proxy mode in shake it REALLY only reads the pixels needed from the harddrive and not the whole image. and that means a lot of speed increase if you think about having some more than foreground and background)
btw: .iff is the native format of shake (yep.. nothing real invented that format, not alias wavefront..)

if you have a hell of ram i would recommend having your files as uncompressed avi or even better quicktime sequence.. THEN shake gets really fast loading, since it block loads the images and does not have to care about file handles and stuff..
but as i menationed: at least windows needs a lot of ram for some reason i dont know.. (if you have a gig ram: go for this solution.. you will love it)

for me an uncompressed quicktime runs with about 15-20 frames a second in shake.. and that is about 20 times faster than single images..

concerning combustion: no clue about that one.. only heard it is not really production ready and stable... but that were just rumours :)

cheers

alexx

[Peter Reynolds]

Yeah iff is a native shake format that was borrowed by AW.

Both Combustion and Shake will accept a variety of image formats.

The other thing to consider is wether you want to do a 2d comp or 3d comp. There is a script floating around (it think I found it on highend2d site) that will convert maya camera data into a Combustion workspace file (cws). I've tried it out on a number of shots and its worked great so far.

AE 5.5 production bundle will also take maya data.

If you were using max, the integration between max and combustion is great.

It would be great to see a bit more 3d integration with shake, as shake is a brilliant piece of software.

[SePu]

heyy folks
thanks for all this tips, I've already tried and it works out...
thanks again .... see ya... :thumbsup:

[svenip]

as far as we do it here, i can recommend the same method alexx mentioned. either use the iff or the quicktime. unfortunatly our big composit can read only uncompressed rgb. that makes a lot of fun if you're working always on 3k images :rolleyes:

[beaker]

>>btw: .iff is the native format of shake (yep.. nothing real invented that format, not alias wavefront..)

>>Yeah iff is a native shake format that was borrowed by AW.

Actually IFF was invented by electronic arts over 15 years ago. It is a very open file format and you can wrap up many different types of information in it. Many companies have used it in the past (amiga iff, apple aiff audio, etc...)

Arnaud Hervas(one of NR's founders) had previously worked at TDI(Thomson Digital Image) which was aquired by Wavefront around 10 years ago(who was later merged with Alias). TDI Explore(TDI's 3d software) used the iff file format that shake and maya later on went on to use.

If you run fcheck from the command line you will see Arnaud's name listed when you run help for it "fcheck --h". :)

[alexx]

beaker MAN..

you are such a terrible smartass!
whenever i think i can shine bright with some smartass infos of myself you always know better .. danm.. i hate it when that happens..

remind me to hire you whenever i am in need of some clever ppl ;)

you rock! :buttrock:

cheers

alexx

[beaker]

I'm not trying to be. I just have a problem when people post incorrect information I am compelled to correct people.

That M$ buying Apple thread had so much mis-information. I had such a hard time not posting to that thead to correct all the FUD in there. I'm just trying to stay away from the mac vs pc wars because they just become mud slinging.

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