The pipeline including a video compositing program like After Effects and a 3D app is quite common among motion design professionals. More than just rendering the 3D content and importing it into AE or Shake, its often needed to use the camera data to get correct tracking.
Sometime ago, when presenting Blender to a friend who works extensively with After Effects, one of the first questions he asked me was if one could smoothly get the camera data from Blender into AE. After some research on this subject, the results were not very pleasing: there was no painless way of doing it.
Well... seems that things have changed!
Andrew Rollo (a.k.a. osxrules) made a Python script that allow us to do export camera data to After Effects and Apple Shake using Maya ASCII format.
You can download it on the BlenderArtists.org thread. Be sure to check for updated versions (in the time of writing this, they are in this post).
Wondering if it works well? I'll quote a response made by an user known as dsp_418:
I've played with your script: actually, it rocks.
I'm not getting any kind of problem, and finally I can exchange data between Blender and After Effects. That's really important for my job (and I think for many other people around who use Blender and do compositing in a commercial environment).
Thanks, Andrew, for making this and Piero for the heads up!
13 Comments
That's pretty cool, Imagine using this in combination with the blenses script.
http://home.metrocast.net/%7Echipartist/BlensesSite/index.html
http://www.mindinsomnia.com/tutorials/image_2_3d/
Sweet stuff.
Cool! I work a lot in AE, but i think that knowing the composite nodes & VSE i can replace it very well... i hope to have the time to switch this year...
osxrules not xD
Anyway, you did a great job! :)
That is a great news, but... it's me or the files (and the site) are gone offline ??
DUDE!! That's so awesome! I've needed a script like this for a long, long time...
YES!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOHOO!
--
Kevin
Awesome, now real world data can be used very good.
Would love to see this in Blender native.
AH! Epic! Glroious! So awesome!
This shall be HIGHLY helpful. Andrew Rollo... you the man.
I am having trouble with this i am using after effects CS3 but when i import the camera i doesnt have the data attached with it :-( (upsetting!) it looks like it des but doesnt i even had the updated version but still know joy i also keep getting this message in the code box of blender every time i try this:
scene.getCurrentCamera deprecated!
use scene.objects.camera instead
scene.getChildren Depercated!
use scene.objects instead
i am a newbe so i dont know how to do any of the coding so i am in need of some help!!!
ANYBODY...?
Hi everyone,
First thanks for that script, i've been looking for it...
I need your help, I have a macbook pro running with Leopard and the latest version of Blender and I'm having trouble making it work (the script, of course). Can someone guide me trhough the installation of this script (on a mac)?
Thanks.
Reply to sambre
you need to use terminal to show hidden files first (i had the same problem yesterday)
open terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
then press enter
then type:
killall Finder
then press enter
then go through your computer and navigate to the blender application
then right click and click on show package contents
then go into contents, macos, .blender, and drop it into scripts folder
then go back into terminal and type the exact same set of lines except change TRUE to FLASE (this makes everything back to normal)
by the way I am having the same problem with the camera data not being there in after effects. It has all the null objects and the camera but no keyframes or anything, just no data attached to the objects or camera.
PLEASE HELP
Thanks Eric!=)
how can i install the script on windows 7 - 64 bit?
the blender i have is 2.49b
python i have installed 2.6.4