camera from cinema 4d to massive prime

[wolf-cub-one]

Zachary,

If you bring it into Maya, then export the camera out as fbx. I don't have Maya and Massive in front of me right now so you'll have to do trial and error to get the right version of fbx to save out that works for your version of Massive.

good luck

[tcastudios]

Should Massive have a simple .chan reader
(that would be fully possible) you can export your camera
using the SteadyCHAN setup found at my site:

www.tcastudios.com -> xfiles

Cheers
Lennart

[Asek702]

thanks for the response. ive tried fbxs but do not get the excat line up shots from cinema youd kinda have to try it out to fully understand how its messin up but ive tried almost everyoption i could to try and get this lined up i guess i should put this in the challenge area lol

cinema 4d box and a camera moving around it on all axis

into massive and have it line up 100 percent

[wolf-cub-one]

thanks for the response. ive tried fbxs but do not get the excat line up shots from cinema youd kinda have to try it out to fully understand how its messin up but ive tried almost everyoption i could to try and get this lined up i guess i should put this in the challenge area lol

cinema 4d box and a camera moving around it on all axis

into massive and have it line up 100 percent

What is not lining up correctly? FOV? Focal length? Timing?
I've brought in camera from Max, Maya, and even Houdini so it should not be a problem. If we use C4D, we use it for final rendering through Cineman and I've never had an issue. Could you be more specific about what is not lining up?

cheers

[chasing]

If you bring it into Maya, then export the camera out as fbx. I don't have Maya and Massive in front of me right now so you'll have to do trial and error to get the right version of fbx to save out that works for your version of Massive.



Excuse me,sir,can you help me to solve this problem?Many thanks!I am using Maya2011 to animate the camera,I also remember to bake the simulation before exporting the camera to a fbx or ma file.But when imported in Massive ,there's a new camera having been imported in but without any animation and keyframes,when I reimport the camera in Maya,nothing seems wrong.I am wondering that what's wrong in my steps.Can you help me?I'll be very grateful!

[wolf-cub-one]

If you are using Maya, then all you need to do is save just the camera as a Maya ascii file. Then just import this camera into Massive.

cheers

[Per-Anders]

Talk to Kai Pedersen, he used Massive with C4D on One Night with the King, I've no idea what the workflow was beyond that it involved using RIB files from AR/Cineman.

[Horganovski]

thanks for the response. ive tried fbxs but do not get the excat line up shots from cinema youd kinda have to try it out to fully understand how its messin up

Unfortunately there are confirmed bugs with Cinemas FBX exporter which mean you don't get consistent rotation data out of it. (if you think it's rough with a camera, it's even worse with character skeletons). I've been nagging Maxon about this for quite a while but we've yet to see them fix it.

Assuming Massive can use aim/up vector controllers for cameras, one possible workaround would be :

Create 3 dummy joints in Cinema, parent them all to the camera, zero them all out so they are in the same orientation and location as it.
Rename one to 'camera position', one to 'camera aim' and one to 'camera up vector'.
Drag the aim one out in Z so it's in front of the camera.
Drag the up vector one up in Y so it's directly above it.
Now unparent the joints and add parent constraints to them targeting the camera so that they maintain their current position relative to the camera but follow it as it moves.
Select the 3 joints and use the Timeline Bake command on them so that they now have world space coordinates baked into them. Now you can delete their constraints.


Now you should be able to export the joints via FBX and since you're now only concerned with their positions rather than rotations (which the FBX bugs don't usually break) you should get them into Massive ok. Then constrain your camera in that using the position, aim and up vectors as you usually would.

If Massive doesn't support aim/up vectors for cameras (I've never used it) you could bring the joints into Maya which definitely does and rig up a camera there, then bake and export as FBX again from that.

Pretty long winded, but it's the only way I know of to get around rotational inconsistencies from the FBX exporter right now.

Cheers,
Brian

[chasing]

If you are using Maya, then all you need to do is save just the camera as a Maya ascii file. Then just import this camera into Massive.

cheers


Well,sorry to trouble you again,sir.I have done all the steps as the Massive introduction said to export and import the camera between Maya and Massive.I exported the baked camera into a Maya Ascii file.However,when I imported the camera(I keep the default directory Cam/),there was only creating an empty camera,without any keyframes and animation.But the name of this empty camera is just the same as the one in Maya.When I reimported the camera into Maya,the camera is still valid.While I have tried this for many many times,but still don't know what's wrong with it,does the version of Maya matter?I am using Maya2011.Have you ever met this kind of problem?I really need help,thank you!

[chasing]

Well,I am afraid that the main reason of the problem I'd met is the version.I changed my project in the version 2008,all the things were perfectly right,well,thank you all the same!

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