Image sequences

[Dalz]

Hi all you Maya artists!! or would be..

I have a little problem with image sequences.. I was originally trying to use AVIs to no avail, but I found out that Maya can only use image sequences.

I made a basic plane and created a material to which I applied a tif sequence generated in After Effects. The image appeared, but when I checked USE IMAGE SEQUENCE the material suddenly went black..

I'd already had some success with a tif sequence that I'd output from the Maya renderer with no problems, but any sequence generated from outside Maya doesn't seem to work!!??

Is this a codec problem? I tried JPEG sequences and uncompressed tif sequences without any joy.. what I don't understand is why it shows me the first image when the use image sequence checkbox is unticked. It also gives me a strange message in the script editor saying that the relevant file doesn't exist!!

anyone more savvy on this stuff?

any help as always will be greatly appreciated..

[Alan]

I was doing this today and had similar issues:

what i did was made sure my frames were padded to four digits e.g. 0100 and then turn on use image sequence. Then there is a box undr that that says "frame number". Click the box next to that and it should add the expression:

frameExtension=frame

If it doesn't do that then it will go black. Make ure your padding is correct I think that may cause you problems

Alan

[Dalz]

Thanks a lot Alan.. that did it.. you were right it was a question of frame padding.. when it was padded to 4 it worked, any other combination with my external image sequences didn't.. and to think I've been working on emergency solutions in After Effects all day!!!

[Alan]

cool! I'm glad it worked maya can be real funny about that sort of thing. generally you should always use 4 digit padding in anything you do because then you are guaranteed that any (read: most!) programs will read the sequence.

:ninja:

Alan