Camera Animation |
To animate the camera I decided to attach a Maya camera to a path. I then wrote an expression to control it's rotation so that it would face the correct way at the correct time. This coupled with the automatic banking effect applied by Maya meant the camera flowed smoothly through the scene. I was originally going to create six shots for this project, ranging from a closeup of the meadows to a fly over of a river but in the end I only had time to complete two. I chose a shot which flies up through a meadow and a shot which gives a birds-eye view of the world I created. I felt that these two shots best showed off my completed work. The camera itself was not setup to any particular standard. Infact I varied the focal length setting throughout the animation so that the scene looked correct. In order to animate the crows seperately in Houdini I also had to work out how to export the Maya camera and it's animation keys into Houdini. I did this by using a MEL script called 'chan dump' which exports selected Maya object channels to a .chan ascii file. This file can be read by Houdini's channel editor and applied to a Houdini camera. This worked fine except for one problem. Houdini's camera aperture settings were in milimetres and Maya's were in inches so a simple conversion expression had to be included to convert between the two at every frame.
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