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Welcome! My name is Alan Shisko, and I'm a freelance motion graphics artist working out of Toronto, Canada. I've been very lucky in my career to have had many inspiring teachers, and decided to start this blog to give back to the community that has enriched me both technically and aesthetically. Perhaps my words and images will inspire you to do the same! If you wish, take a minute to view my demo reel at Shisko.com, or view a comprehensive gallery of my past work Here.


Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Max2AE Global Scale



If you use Boomerlabs' "Max2AE" plugin a lot, you've probably come across an issue where you have to scale your After Effects layers very small to get them to fit the 'world space' that was exported from your 3ds Max project. Depending on your project settings, you might find that you need to scale a 3d After Effects layer as small as 1% to get it to 'fit'.

Now the interchange will still "work" visually (things line up where they're supposed to and such), but you'll find yourself saddled with a few gotchas. For instance, dealing with layers that are so 'small' can make layer tranforms (like moving) very difficult to execute when scrubbing in After Effects. Panning around the worldspace can be painful. And most importantly, you'll find that your shadows look AWFUL.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to fix this problem, so long as you know what to look for and plan ahead a bit. Take a look at THIS tutorial (Quicktime, h.264, 9:35, 33 megs) that walks you through the process.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU!

Unknown said...

Alan,

Great job! I'm sure many MAX2AE users will find this useful.

Another way to calculate the scale is to take the inverse of scale of the layer you overlayed in AE. For example, in AE, you scaled the second layer down to 4%, so you would use a scale in MAX2AE of (1.0/0.04) 25. The net result is the same, but wanted to show another way to calculate it.

-Matt Kaustinen, Boomer Labs

Alan Shisko said...

Math makes my head hurt!

Thanks for the explanation, Matt. Oh, and thanks for the great product, too :)

Unknown said...

Thanks alan,

There is something wrong I think. No sound at all!!!

I'll try to download it again and see.