maya camera mapping

[Chris Marshall]

Hi All, and happy new year

Really sorry to have to ask a Maya question, but I'm struggling generally with texturing, texture supports and the difference between Soft and Maya. But the one thing I can't figure out is how to camera map / camera projection, which was so easy in Soft. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Chris

[Andy Nicholas]

Yep, Maya is a complete disaster if you're trying to create actual UVs based on a camera projection. For some reason (in my experience at least), Maya always fits the resulting UVs to the 0->1 region afterwards which makes it completely useless (it must do it just for lolz I guess). If I recall correctly, it won't leave it as a live operation either. Quite how this functionality has remained in its current state is quite beyond me. I guess no one actually uses it.

AFAIK, I think the way most people do it, is to use a camera projection shader, and have a duplicate camera in the scene.

Quite happy to stand corrected on any of the above if you know a way to make it work in the proper (Soft) way. I guess there's probably a mel script for it.

Ugh.

A

[Chris Marshall]

Thanks Andy,

I'd figured this wasn't going to be easy, but it seems almost everything I want to do in Maya is either a workaround, or it simply doesn't do it. Or there's a Mel script for it!

I've been working with some students who have built an object that sits in a background plate they've photographed themselves. So I wanted them to build a ground plane onto which the image is mapped with a camera projection. Isn't this common practice?

Cheers

--

Chris Marshall

Mint Motion Limited

029 20 37 27 57

07730 533 115

www.mintmotion.co.uk

[Andy Nicholas]

Heh! You'd have thought so, right :)

Yep you can use a projection for that. I think you just right click on the image shader in the Hypershade's shader palette, and choose "Apply as projection" or whatever it says. You should have an option on the projection node it creates to use a camera as its basis. 

[Chris Marshall]

ok I'll take a look.

Cheers