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blender-to-apple-motion-5-script

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?227090-Blender-to-Apple-Motion-export-script

Disclaimer: I did not create this script, just wanted to host it via github in case the link on blenderartists goes down. See the original link in the description

Blender to Apple Motion export script

osxrules:

Similar to the Maya Ascii script, I have developed one for Apple's Motion program. Motion has a number of nice features and is very cheap. It is £35 as opposed to £750+ for After Effects. It's also entirely hardware-accelerated so is fairly quick at rendering. It also integrates with Final Cut Pro so you can make up Motion templates with drop-zones and reuse clips.

The script is available here:

http://www.dev-art.co.uk/files/motion_camera_tracking.py.zip

There's a video that follows showing how the process works between Cinema 4D and Motion:

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/motiongraphicsvizfx/video/cinema4d_finally_brings_3d_to_motion/

You should be able to achieve the same thing with this Blender script.

If you run the script in the text editor, it will put an entry into the file > export menu to Apple Motion (.motn). When you select this, it will ask for an export location and save out a Motion project file with a .motn extension.

You would render your Blender animation out with appropriate masks and save it in a format that Motion will recognise. Then open the .motn file by double-clicking. To get round some stability issues with IDs in the file, it is setup as a Motion 3 file so will ask to upgrade it, which is fine - when you save the file, it adds all the required data back in. Hopefully this means it will work in Motion 3, 4 and 5 but I only tested it in version 5.

You import your rendered clip into Motion and drop it into the scene on a new layer and set this layer to not be a 3D layer. Any objects you add into the scene as 3D layers should then follow the camera movement and match the rendered footage.

This export is a bit different from the Maya one and I was able to exclude more redundant keyframes so should hopefully be faster and less memory intensive but naturally with changes, there's a chance it's messed up some things so if you can test it out and let me know if anything has gone wrong, I'll try and get it to a state where it's reliable to use.