Maya to AE

Things to take note

Rename locators in Maya to null_shape01 & so on & so fourth.
Bake all frames required of camera as well as locators. It will shift the keyed range to start from frame0 in After Effects.

Use this mel script found on Maya Station to clear all junk in file if you have issues saving out as .ma from .mb
There are 3 different types of unknown nodes that can prevent re-saving as a different format. 
Unknown nodes, unknown transforms and unknown dag nodes. 
The other two are uncommon. But it’s worth mentioning .to delete all three types:

delete `ls -type unknown -type unknownDag -type unknownTransform`

Also, if there are still issues, it could do with left over referencing junk. Turn off Display on DAG objects in outliner and delete everything else but be-careful not to delete the animation nodes.

Last thing is the scaling issue which I will re-write here after discussions.

Scale issues with locators.
Alt Click on the position button of the null and then under expression type - transform.position*100 on all nulls.

Import Maya Camera to After Effects

To import Maya information from Maya to After Effects.

Be sure to set the frame rate to be identical to the After Effects Scene file.
Camera1 seems to work and I am sure the basic names work but no perspective & orthographic cameras.
To bake camera animation go to Edit -> Keys -> Bake Simulation and make sure the camera is not under any group nodes. If not use the constraint keys and bake the new camera.

Nulls can be named NULL, null or Null.

Upon export, select on the camera and relevant nulls that are to be used and export that as a .ma file.

Maya 2010, After Effects CS5

Cloth Galore - SYOG

Okay so we just almost wrapped up the Singapore Youth Olympic Games project. We provided quite a bit of the actual game day graphics and there was a big part of cloth, clouds and after effects involved. I will post the results but there are a lot of questions I have about cloth that has been left un-answered. Leaving this post here for me to remember and fill it up.

Most of the problems came from caching, projection of UV's after the fact and also the use of the animate along path. I think there is a bug somewhere in the process. SOMEWHERE!.