Cameras from FBX imported with wrong rotation

[briareos_kerensky]

Good day everyone,
I'm trying to import animated cameras created in 3ds Max 2020 into Terragen 3 through FBX, but all imports appear to be rotated.

In 3ds Max, the camera is targeted: the camera itself is linked to a spline, the target to the object it needs to follow. I bake ("collapse" in Max's terminology) the animation into keyframes, and export as FBX, selecting 2014/2015 for compatibility and Z as the up axis. If I reimport the FBX into 3ds Max, everything is fine.

However, in Terragen the camera is always rotated at times on more than two axis: the camera in "LinkedCamera.fbx" points at the sky while it should be pointing down to the ground; the camera in the other file, "UnlinkedCamera.fbx" appears rotated on two axis...it looks so strange that I'm not really sure on which and by how much.

I tried a number of options in Terragen 3: import Z-up, import rotation, convert to meters, with no success.

So I went back to 3ds Max and tried to unlink the camera from the parents and recreate the animation "by hand"...and that's how "UnlinkedCamera.fbx" was created.

I attached a zip archive with the two cameras.

Help?

[sboerner]

I don't use 3ds Max but looked it up . . . it uses a right-handed, z-up coordinate system. Terragen uses a left-handed, y-up coordinate system. (I do use Maya, which is right-handed, y-up.) You'll need to convert your camera coordinates. Maya can export chan files, which can be processed and then imported into Terragen, and there are also conversion scripts. Maybe there is something similar for Max.

[briareos_kerensky]

There's a setting to convert to Y-up during the FBX export, and there's the option to have the Z axis up during import in Terragen, but neither option give any result. And the camera movement is imported correctly (like the camera moving vertically instead of horizontally), only the rotation is.

[briareos_kerensky]

Solved! Terragen 3 doesn't play nice with FBX files newer than ver. 2013.

[sboerner]

Interesting, good work. I'm glad it all worked out for you.

[digitalguru]

Solved! Terragen 3 doesn't play nice with FBX files newer than ver. 2013.

I've seen that before and rolling back the FBX version is always the thing to try - it's the same with Nuke too.