Projection Mapping - Testing your Animations with the Model in Maya

Testing your animations on the model with Maya

Hey everyone, today I want to talk about an approach I am using to get a preview of what my abstract animations look like when they are applied to the 3d model. I am creating my animations in After Effects and previewing my animations in Maya. Because of how Maya handles movie textures, this method is not always perfect but I’m finding it useful. I'm using Maya 2015 and Adobe CC.

1) Create your animation in After Effects and add it to the Render Queue (Ctrl-m).

- Maya is picky about what movies it is able to play as a texture and appears to require an AVI file. AVI files, especially ones created in After Effects, can be really large. My first video was 12GB for 1 minute of video. Rendering as an AVI will give you a video Maya can use, and one you can take to Media Encoder and convert to a lighter format.

***To have your animation apply to the model with the correct aspect ratio, you should use a resolution where the height and width are the same. Otherwise there will be some compression as Maya takes your 1920x1080 video and forces it into a 1:1 aspect ratio. But since this is just for testing, it’s up to you if you care. MadMapper is able to use video files of whatever aspect ratio without distorting the texture.***

-Leaving your 'Output Module' at 'Lossless' seems to produce an acceptable AVI. 

- Set the save location of your movie by clicking on the name of your composition next to ‘Output To:’

- Click ‘Render’

2) Once you have an AVI movie file, you are ready to apply it to the model. Open Maya and import the .OBJ into an empty scene.

- Open the Hypershade: Windows-Rendering Editors-Hypershade

- In the left shader list, select ‘Lambert’

- With the new model selected, Rt click and hold on the new Lambert shader to bring up the hotbox. Move your mouse to 'Assign material to selected' and release the mouse. Select the Lambert and find its attributes in the ‘Attribute Editor’ on the right side of the Maya workspace. Click on the checked icon next to ‘Color’

- This will bring up a ‘Create Render Node’ dialogue with a list of nodes to choose from. Scroll down until you see the ‘Movie’ node and select it.

- In the movie node attributes, click the file icon next to ‘Image Name:’. Navigate to where you saved your AVI and select it.

- Check the box for ‘Use Image Sequence’

Clicking play in the time slider should play your animation on the model. 

If you used an aspect ratio that is not 1:1 there will be some compression in the movie as it plays on the model. This is my 1920x1080 AVI playing on the model.

Projection Animation Test

Get the current UVed Obj here.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzoO6NdahmKjcDI0Rjd2ckt2Mlk/view?usp=sharing

Converting your massive AVI (or any video) into a lighter format with Adobe Media Encoder

1) Open Media Encoder.
2) Drag and drop your AVI into the ‘Queue’.Media encoder sets the encoding to ‘H.264’ by default. This will give you a much smaller .mp4, but you can change it to whatever you need. My 12GB movie reduced to 87MB.
3) By clicking the green play arrow at the top right of the Queue, media encoder will get to work. 

   The time it takes to evaluate is based on the length of the source video (I think). You can also crop the beginning and end of your video by double clicking on ‘Match Source – high bitrate’ under presets.  

 

Start and end times are adjusted with the time slider in the bottom left.