Import a Maya Scene

Import a Maya Scene

You import a .ma scene the same way you would any
element; make sure it has the .ma extension to be recognized
properly. After Effects will import either one or two
compositions: one for a Maya project with a square pixel
aspect ratio, and two for nonsquare (a square pixel version
is nested in the nonsquare one).
Your camera may be single-node (in which case the camera
holds all of the animation data) or targeted, in which case
the transformation data resides in a parent node to which
the camera is attached.
Any null object with the word “null” in its name is also
imported. Depending on your tracker and your scene, you
may import so many nulls with the scene that it becomes
cumbersome. A composition with 500 layers, even nulls,
quickly becomes unwieldy, so if possible, weed out the
useless nulls, paring it down to a couple dozen of them
(adding descriptive names) in the tracking software or 3D
program. It’s usually easy to make out what the nulls correspond
to in the scene if you watch them over the background
plate; they tend to cluster around certain objects.
If all of those nulls make their way into After Effects, fi nd
the dozen or two that are useful to you in the scene, and
select those in the Timeline along with the camera and its
parent null (if any). Context-click on the selected layers
and choose Invert Selection to select the potentially hundreds
of other unused nulls. Delete them.
If the nulls come in with tiny values—say, all in the single
digits—you can add a null, make it 3D and set its Position
to 0,0,0, parent all layers of the imported Maya comp to it,
and scale up the null. Now hold down the Option/Alt key
and un-parent all of those layers; the scaled values stick.
You can also use this method to invert a scene that comes
in upside-down.