Camera Mixer
As an animator, I often have to deal with several cameras in a scene.
The last project I worked on contained 8 cameras (for 8 plans), it was a layout single maxfile that was given to me, I had to create the final animations.
But then I started thinking about the layout creation itself.
The workflow is this one :
- Use camera name patterns : CameraName startFrame – endFrame (“Plan01 0 – 150″, “Plan02 0 – 50″)
- Create previews as jpg sequence, one for each camera
- Import and Edit the sequences with Premiere/After FX/Whatever
- Compile and Check the result
Issues :
- Each time the animation is corrected (cameras or actors), the user has to regenerate the preview of modified sequences, reload them in After/Premiere, and compile the whole project to see the result.
- Each time a camera frame range is modified, you have to correctly rename it to maintain the project homogenous
This is annoying. That’s why I started developing Camera Mixer for 3dsmax.
It’s kind of a track mixing tool : it has an independant timeline (the equivalent of the film editing software one), in which you can set the sequence of the different cameras of the scene.
The features will be as follow :
- Editing of the camera sequences
- Real time playing
- File sequence preview for not realtime playable scenes
- Load/Save of mix files
- Export a composition for After FX
The tool is developed using python, wxWidgets, and maxscript. Stay tuned.