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Angela Magrath
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Camera Animation?

Hi,

I am just learning Marvelous.

Does anybody know if there is a way to animate a camera position within Marvelous, or bring in a custom animated camera from an external source? e.g. Maya.

I see that you can save and load camera projection and camera transformation files which set the camera to where I want on one particular frame, but is there any way to keyframe the camera within Marvelous, or read in camera animation over a frame range?

Thanks in advance

  • Marvelous Designer Team COMMUNITY MANAGER Comment actions Permalink

    Hello @...,

    Yes, you can import camera animation made in Maya into Marvelous Designer with FBX format. Be aware that the frame range cannot be changed. 

     

  • Angela Magrath Comment actions Permalink

    Thanks for the fast response.

    I gave that a try. I am using MD 8 and Maya 2019.

    I exported an animated test camera as an FBX from Maya. My exported camera has animated translate and rotate channels, and also an animated focal length.

    I tried to import it into MD 8 by going to File->Import->FBX. My import options were Camera checkbox turned ON, and "auto-scale" turned ON. I tried with and without the animation checkbox on too (wasn't sure if you needed this to bring in camera animation).

    A node got created in MD for my test camera - (I see my camera listed in the Scene) - however, the camera has no animation on it.

    I kept getting an error pop up saying "Failed to Load. Files does not contain any mesh nodes". All I exported in my FBX was the camera.

    I tried with a few different import options but had no luck getting my camera to move. Is this a feature that is only implemented in MD 9, or can you think of anything that I could be doing wrong here.

    Thanks in advance!

     

     

    I tried with a few different options.

     

     

     

  • Angela Magrath Comment actions Permalink

    Any ideas on this? I haven't received a response from anybody and am still very keen to do this?

    Thanks

  • Angela Magrath Comment actions Permalink

    Hi Marcus,

     

    Thanks for this. I tried it.

    In Maya 2018 I created a polyCube, a default maya camera, and a joint. They all had the same animation on them and were not in a hierarchy.

    I exported them all as an FBX with default settings.

    I imported them into Marvelous 8.

    I see the items in my scene hierarchy within Marvelous, I can set my camera to be the one that I imported. I see a new track show up in the animation editor within Marvelous......but when I select my camera it isn't moving, and when I look at it's properties, none of it's attributes are changing for verticalAngle, horizontalAngle and Distance (Maybe this isn't supposed to change, but I would at least expect to see the camera moving)

    :-(

    Are your joint, cube and camera in a hierarchy? If so, can you very specifically tell me what is parented under what so I can exactly replicate this?

    Maybe I should try from Daz although I'd rather not introduce another software package into my workflow.

    Any ideas?

  • Angela Magrath Comment actions Permalink

    I am trying to make a little tool to record my marvelous sim through the shot camera, and spit out a sequence of PNG frames.

    I have got the generation of the PNG frame sequence working, but just need to get the camera moving.

    I think that I have figured out the relationship between the Maya camera attributes and the Marvelous camera attributes, so as a backup I can probably set the camera values to load from file frame by frame in my tool before I generate the PNG on each frame. However, it would be much more interactive to actually be able to scrub the timeline in animation mode and see the simulation with the correct camera.

    I know that you said that the camera is in the right place and you see a new animation track for your camera, but do you actually see the camera moving in the 3D view over time? 

  • Angela Magrath Comment actions Permalink

    Thanks Marcus for spending the time to try to get this working regardless.

    To get my tool working in the meantime, I think that I will just try to tick through the timeline frame by frame - set cam attributes from file, capture png, set cam attrs from file, capture png, etc.

    This should work ok for now. It is nowhere near as interactive as I was hoping for though and I won't be able to evaluate the simulation through camera within marvelous, and I will need to capture the frame range in order to see what things look like.

    Marvelous developers, if you know a way of doing this that we are missing then please let me know.

    Otherwise I will sit tight and hope that this is something that works in the next version.

     

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