© 2003 by Al Street. All Rights Reserved.
Watch for Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects Volume 2: Advanced Techniques by Trish and Chris Meyer. Demonstrated are techniques for translating camera moves from LightWave using the TransMotion Utilities Pack, plus techniques for integrating LightWave plus several other 3D programs (Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Electric Image, and others) with After Effects. And much more...
Available Spring 2003
Overview: When baking camera motion data for export to a 3D compositing program, care must be taken to bake the data correctly. If the camera is free (no target), the motion can be baked using Bake Selected Curves in the Graph Editor. If the camera is the child of another object, baking in the Graph editor still works. The problem comes when attempting to bake the camera motion when the camera has a target.In the screenshots below, the camera's Heading and Pitch controllers are set to Point At Target. The rotation readout shows the camera's true World rotation at frame 3, while that in the Graph Editor reflects the rotation that would exist if the camera did not have a target.
Rotation displayed in Layout interface does not match that shown in Graph Editor. Frame 3 shows 2.29 degrees for Heading in Layout, but 8.74 in the Graph Editor. If you Bake Selected Curves in the Graph Editor, you will get incorrect values when you save the motion file.
To prevent this, use the Motion Baker modifier to bake the camera rotations. But beware! If you decide to bake all the camera's motions as shown
You end up with the following incorrect results:
The solution is to bake the position keys in the Graph Editor with Bake Selected Curves, and bake the rotations using the Motion Baker modifier as shown:
With the following (correct) results:
