As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d lost a lot of time on my individual project due to technical difficulties with the image plane, unsolvable in the hypershade, the attribute editor, or even by recreating the dewarped footage.
After running through a couple of options today, we found the solution: the EXR files were simply to large to run compatibly in Maya on the image plane. I put the EXR files through Media Encoder, converted them to JPEGs, and found that they ran perfectly.
So now that I’ve finally got a working scene, I can return to the task from last week and build geo for it, aligning it as tightly as I can with the shot in order to make up for the unfortunate use of the nodal camera necessary for this track. Once I’ve got my geo built and my character rig in and scaled, I will review the scene with Dom to make sure it is ready for animation. Thankfully, I’ve got a second session with Dom scheduled for this week on Friday, so I’ll be able to move along with my progress at a faster rate and make up for some of the time lost on this issue.
Below I am including a list from my handwritten notes on how to snap a 3DE scene to the ground plane in Maya, because I continually forget and end up writing and researching it repeatedly. I attempted to break down the steps more thoroughly in my notes this time.
3DE Scene Snap to Ground Plane in Maya Process:
- Select scene, then hit W, followed by D, to bring up the pivot point
- Middle mouse drag the pivot to a point in the scene while holding V to snap.
- Hit D again, and, holding X, snap the scene to the center of the world.
- Turn on frustrum display controls, allowing you to see the camera’s angle in the world.
- Add another 0 to the image plane depth, allowing geo to move through it.
Now, when you load a character or object into the scene, they will automatically spawn in the image plane, and once the scene is scaled and sized correctly, blend seamlessly.