Explosions
 

Alright. So I'm pretty new to maya and just learned some basics with motiontracking. What I'm trying to do is motion track a piece of footage, then add an explosion into it. I've created the explosion using about 10 different fluid containers and I motiontracked the footage in another maya scene. I have the solution in mayalive, but I can't figure out how to put everything together. It won't let me export the solution-it brings up an error message and shuts maya down, so I was wondering if it is possible to do it another way. Also, I just got AE CS3 and I've heard you can import the camera movements from maya into an AE scene. What would be the best thing to do? Do you render the explosion against a black background and key into the footage on AE, or do you go about it another way?

I'm very frustrated because the motiontracking is done, the explosion is done, but I can't finish it up.

Could someone tell me step by step what to do?? Sorry for being such a noob!

Thanks a lot!

Michael

Welcome to SM mflourishes.

It looks like you have a combination of questions here all relating to the final composite of your fire matched to your tracked data correct?

Well, for many obvious reasons, I and many other working professionals have never used Maya Live as it just wasn't as intuitive and versitile as other mainstream 3D trackers out there. As you are finding out the hard way:(

Having said that, instead of trying to export your data, you should parent your group of fire elements to one of the track (feature) points (or a locator) so that the fire is in the right position in 3d matched how you want it.

Then, simply render a sepparate pass of just your fire with an UNpremultiplied Alpha and composite that together with your footage in AE:)

Let us know how that works for you.

PS, I also moved this thread to the correct forum for your question:)