OTOY Forums

When I try to use a backplate in Maya it appears dark and seems to be effected by light and exposure. There also doesn't seem to be a method of controlling the backplate gamma. Is there a supported way of using backplates in the Maya plugin?

Assuming you are are using maya camera image plane for your backplate, there's no way to control gama always assumed to be 2.2.
I can't see the image affected by light, but the image is affected by tonemaping in case you're are not rendering to linear openexr.

Are you using HDR for your backplate ? (you're not supposed to)

O sorry, I tested too quickly, and had totaly forgot about that, yes the image is affected by lighting, haha , this is completly useless. (I usually alway do backplate in post).

Right, I remember now, JimStar didn't use the "background image" feature from standalone when he implemented that (which is a true backplate not affected by light). Maybe it was not accessible from SDK.
Anyway, as is, the current feature in Maya is useless and very annoying as there's no way to tell an image plane to not be rendered you have to delete them...
This feature should be erased from the code, I'll do a bug report about that.

And I guess one of the next plugin version may give access to the standalone feature. There's also in V3 a second "visible environement", used with a texture projected from camera could also be useful for that.

calus wrote: O sorry, I tested too quickly, and had totaly forgot about that, yes the image is affected by lighting, haha , this is completly useless. (I usually alway do backplate in post).

Right, I remember now, JimStar didn't use the "background image" feature from standalone when he implemented that (which is a true backplate not affected by light). Maybe it was not accessible from SDK.
Anyway, as is, the current feature in Maya is useless and very annoying as there's no way to tell an image plane to not be rendered you have to delete them...
This feature should be erased from the code, I'll do a bug report about that.

And I guess one of the next plugin version may give access to the standalone feature. There's also in V3 a second "visible environement", used with a texture projected from camera could also be useful for that.

I report that ages a go....anyway still a lot troubles for Maya and live action workflow the layers is useless and still giving a weird edge issues when come to the shadow pass ( should be only shadow)
the only way is done in a old school style and render different renders. not easy to work with.

Jolbertoquini wrote: I report that ages a go

Yes I know, but now that we have a proper bug section, I'll do a proper bug report there if the issue is still in the new Kai release.
The worst thing ever with this image-plane feature/Bug, I often have to deal with some scenes in reference from modelers who have used an image plane in a camera very hidden in hierarchy and referenced,
this is hell to debug this kind of problem, each time I wonder if I'm not going crazy, then I finally find the faulty hidden Camera/image plane and delete it in a file I'm not supposed to modify at all...
so much time waisted ...