I’d like to be able to export a camera from Flame to Blender (or your 3dCC of choice), but it does not work well.
I can export an FBX camera and Blender(4.5, using the FBX (experimental) option) imports it, but the camera is oriented wrong.
For example, with a basic Z-move in flame (what blender would call a Y move), the Blender camera loads pointing sideways as opposed to fowards. You’d assume this might be a difference between Z-up Blender and Y-Up flame, but the camera motion is not moving in the direction of the camera.
In a more perfect world, Action could export an Alembic file with all image cards and geo in the scene, but for the time being it would be pretty cool if we could properly pass cameras back and forth, but it does not appear to work.
You can obviously track cameras in 3rd party apps that will generate identical cameras in each software, but given that Flame can export cameras, it would be nice if we didn’t have to. Especially since Blender has a very good particle system, something on many Flame users’ wishlist.
Hi Andy. In flame we have two different types of cameras. The first one, the oldest one, and the one that appears in action by default, and the second one, which contains another data order, naming, and parameters that work with the cameras of every other mayor software. Using the second one allows you to share the cameras wo any issue. The problem is, if you are doing mono analysis inside Flame, the camera coming with the data belongs to the first one, and I haven’t found a solution to convert the camera to the second. Maybe this could be a Python script, but I am not savvy enough on that subject. But if you import a camera abc, it comes with the second set of parameters.
And totally agree we should have the option to export abc from flame
Yes. Found similar frustrations along my long trip down the rabbit hole w cameras and lenses. ABC ok. USD great btw apps, but that’s a steep ask for Flame.
Got a fun setup to try out if you run Flame2027. What I mapped previously in FBX in now do in embedded metadata. Action was a great tool for exporting lens distortion and vignetting as well as sensor size, etc to work btw DCC (flame, Houdini Unreal for me) I’ll prep a longer post to follow, but this is a fun toy to play with. Hit me up.
Mono Analysys writes to a “Camera 3d” which i believe is the newer of the two (introduced back when 3D was all the rage in like 2012), but it only exports FBX, and does so in a way that Blender does not like.*
The old camera “Camera” node can be w-Linked to a “3D Camera” node and gets all the appropriate position data.
*Importing a FBX2020 (or most any date really) will bring in the camera, but a few things need to be adjusted.
Set the Camera Scale to 1.0 AFTER IMPORT (it’s set at a very small number, so the camera will look like a dot in your scene)
Apply a “Track To” constraint to the camera and have it look at the Camera.Target that also loaded. This will get the camera pointed in the right direction.
After some further testing with Syntheyes, it seems that most of the issue is in Blender’s FBX import, so I’m gonna go make an FR for “Export camera as alembic” if there isn’t one.
Slip timing -1 frame (as Flame always adds a frame on export)
Flame’s FBX export has always been buggy and that one frame offset is always embarrassing when exporting to Blender, Houdini, Nuke etc as I always have to explain to the person I’m sending the camera to that it will be offset.
Yeah, I think what would benefit everyone is something that is idiot proof. I’m a reasonably savvy person and if there’s more than 1-nonstandard button press or setting adjustment I’m likely to give up.
Which is to say I am the idiot I’d like the software to be proofed against.
There’s a lot of value in being able to round trip to a 3d software (particles, nice rendering, geo, etc) and it feels like a low-hanging fruit to just get a marginally better export out of Action.
Blender is opensource which means you can cli it. Yesterday I ran some tests and I have a send to blender working as a single click hook. Send to Flame from blender as well. Just need to finish it up. I added it as part of my camera calibrator project.
It did get me thinking about geometry transfer as well and what that would look like but I need to do some real work for a while.
