Hi

Is there a way to convert a chan file exported from Nuke so it can be read by After Effects in the same way it reads a Maya scene ?

I have a huge job which intensively needs to integrate particles in camera tracked shots. Unfortunately there doesn´t seem to be plenty of information on Nuke and particles, and I can´t guess how to make them work. So I´m thinking of alternatives...

The only other solution I can think of is using Boujou to do the camera tracking, as it does integrate well with After Effects and it is a known pipeline for me...

Please please help !!

If only someone out there could explain properly how the hell you use particles in Nuke...

Nuke X  6.0.1  - After Effects CS5 -  Mac OSX 10.6.2

I know that there is some plugins to have particules in Nuke but i never tried. It will come at some point build in nuke as i have seem a foundry beta of an inbuild particules ystem 2 years ago... not sure what they r waiting.
if you use boujou you can use it camera in nuke and after fx and if necessary export  at a diffrent format for each soft i don't really see what your problem is ??
i haven't use 3D in afterFX though, if the export from boujou doesn't work for aFX and the chan neither, try fbx.
i would suggest to ask the question on aFX forums as the problem doesn't seems nuke related

hope it helps
Cheers

I might not have explained myself clearly, and actually have made 2 questions in one. I´m attaching the snapshot for to facilitate things. First of all, I have this low-res sample from which Nuke´s camera tracker has given me a surprisingly solid track. (I have disabled the camera tracker node to avoid the point cloud to obscure the plate in the snapshot). Now, in Nuke X 6.0.1 there is a ParticleSystem node. I would suppose somehow you link it with the cloud points to make it work, and you feed it somehow with whatever you want the particles to be generated from. But nothing happens and, as you can see, the help is not very explanatory. I might be making a silly question here but I just don´t know how you use the ParticleSystem node and have not been able to find much info about it. There´s no info about it in the manual. Also, some people have published custom particle system nodes but neither have I been able to install them and make use of them. There´s one in this very site, but I haven´t been able to install it. (I think there´s a mistake, it reads it´s for Nuke 5 and then for Nuke 6, the installation notes seem to correspond to Nuke 5)

http://www.creativecrash.com/nuke/downloads/scripts-plugins/3rd-party-apps/c/particle-system-for-nuke-6--2/description#tabs

So my first attempt was to export the camera tracker information and do the job, or part of it, in After Effects. But Nuke exports a chan file, which After Effects doesn´t read. That´s why now I´m kind of bound to use the Boujou-AFX pipeline. Which is a shame cause nowadays I´m very comfortable with Nuke and would prefer to do the whole thing with it.

I never tried to import a chan in afterFX try importing your chan in maya or similar then re export your camera in a format than efterFX can import. I may be wrong but i think they have added a fbx export on new versions of nuke.

for your particule system, it is not an inbuild nuke tool i never used this plugin so i cannot help, but i assume it is build to work in a 2D space and should be in you 3D part of the tree. though your scene accepted the node so... once again i don't know this tool

Hm, i dont know in how far it is related to this, but speaking of Particles and Nuke, i think, it is worth to mention that Red Giant have released Trapcode Particular for Nuke. A DemoVersion is available on their website, if you want to try it.

I think, this is interesting especially since you mention that you wanted to do the particles in AfterEffects. So if you know Particular for AE, well, the Parameters for the Particlesystem are pretty much the same for the Nuke-Version. Check out the Foundries Website, they have some more information on that there, as well as some getting-started videos on Particular for Nuke. I hope this helps.