Import camera with Offset

It would be great if EmberGen could import Maya cameras with offset.

We are working on a total rework of how our imports work. Let me know if you have any more specifics or a file to test with.

Hi Nick - as you may remember we discussed the problems with importing cameras back in January and you said

“Regardless, we hope to have this fixed in our next cycle dev cycle… so probably for a march/april release is my personal goal of when I want us to get this done, but there’s a lot of things riding on getting this fixed so I don’t know if we can fix it that quickly. Just know that it’s one of our top priorities as it’s the biggest workflow hinderance we currently face.”

It’s now nearly July - can you give me any idea of when this is going to happen?

I’ve just spent three days trying to set up an embergen explosion using a camera from Syntheyes, transferred by fbx. Of those three days maybe two hours was spent on working on the explosion simulation and the rest dealing with the many issues in importing. Even when I get that right tweaking the position and scaling is extremely difficult - using global transform in the import settings means you have to jump back and forth between the default view and render view to get any idea of where you are. And of course when you tweak the scaling you have to start again with the position lineup because the position changes.

And I’ve just discovered another bug - having finally got the position and scaling matched in a view that works I saved my embergen file out. When I read it back in the camera move now has two huge jumps in it, where the camera changes position over two frames. This has happened three times. I now have to keep back up copies of anything I do in case embergen borks the camera move again. I’ll report this as a bug in a separate thread, hopefully with an example file.

I love the simulations embergen produces but until a stable and usable import system happens it is very difficult to use in a professional vfx situation. I realize that a lot of your focus is on games work and possibly this issue isn’t relevant there and maybe this is contributing to the delay in dealing with this. If this is the case please let me know so I can plan around it.

Also, fbx is maybe not the best way to go. The format is famous for bugs, huge differences in versions and implementations and constant timing and scaling issues - I’ve spent months of my life trying to match up fbx workflows.

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