Match Moving Tutorial Part II

Import your image sequence. This part is about as self explanatory as it gets. You may have to create a 'new project' or 'new folder' depending on your tracking software.
With your sequence imported let's start. Now some applications have a 'wizard' or guide that will take you from start to finish and get you a fairly decent Auto track. Every now and then an auto track will come out clean and won't need a re-track or re-solve but don't count on it. The purpose of the tutorial is to teach you the terms and how to adjust settings and not rely on automated tracking. Which likely wont work if you have subject in the scene moving in relation to your ground plane. I'll explain this in the next section.

The next step is to actually do the tracking. This will likely be call something along the lines of "Track Features" as it is in Boujou, and I believe Icarus. Now, if your footage includes something along the lines of maybe a guy running down a street and you plan on compositing a monster chasing him we might have some more work to do before we hit that magic 'track' button. If your main character is running, you don't want the software thinking his is a part of the environment and take that motion into consideration when creating your ground plane. You're going to have to mask him out. An autotrack can to a pretty good job in most apps of realizing when if you have a subject moving in relation to a background but it's not worth risking the possibility of a useless track.  Boujou's button is called 'Create Poly-Mask' which I would apply frame by frame around my moving subject until he is masked out of my footage.

Now you can track your footage. At this point you can either grab a latte or sit and watch those little colored dots wiggle around your screen a top your footage. These dots are called points or locators. You can change the number, relation distance, min./max. search distance, and all sorts of settings  so better suit your track. For the most part, the default settings have suited me just fine. If you are having issues with footage that has a lot of movement for example, try bumping up the search distance to allow the locators more area to search for their intended target. Number of locators will give you more points to work with but also take longer to track.

If you planned ahead, you may have stuck objects in your scene to help your application with tracking.
You can attach specific locators to these points if you wish.

Once your footage is done tracking (this time varies depending on length of footage and speed of machine) you should be able to scroll through your footage and see a bunch of those locators "stuck" to your footage.
We're almost done with this part!

If you have a clean track it is time to move on and 'Solve' for your 3D camera. All this means is your locator points' movement in relation to eachother will be taken and used to re-create the movement of your actually camera. Pretty cool stuff. This is another "sit back and wait" parts of the process.
Now if you remembered what I said about including x, y, and z reference lines in your footage you should have no problem with this part.
In order to orient your virtual camera (tell it which way is up, down, left, right, front and back) you need to create 'Scene Geometry'. This will either be selecting  points along known X, Y, or Z axis or drawing your own lines. Again, this part varies according to application.
After solving for your camera, you are basically finished (as long as you have a clean track, solve, and your camera is correctly oriented).

To test that your track worked correctly your application should give you an option to add 'Test objects' such as a cube or ground plane. If your ground plane looks accurate, congratulations you are finished with this stage.

Your last step is just to export the track to a workable format for your 3D application like Maya or 2D such as After Effects.

Part 3 Next.

Match Moving Tutorial Part I

Match Moving. Big fancy word for extracting usable data from your video footage to create a camera in your 3d app for compositing.
Before we start I'll let you know I'm using Boujou. It's not free, but it's the most user-friendly tracking software I've found to date. You can use Icarus (free) or Autodesk MatchMover (free for students).
Button names may differ slightly but the concept is the same. So where do we start?

Footage
What kind of footage are you working with?
The majority of cameras out today are HD, atleast 1280x720. This gives you quite a bit of data to work with. Now we can talk all day about how many lines the camera actually resolves and how most HD I don't consider HD, but that's not what this tutorial is about. The key is always getting clean footage to work with.

-Here is another technical bit. With the movement from CCD sensors to CMOS sensors we've gotten a great improvement in video quality. But with new technology comes new problems, inevitably. Enter Rolling-Shutter. Again, I won't go deep into the technical stuff but rolling shutter is basically when one part of your frame is scanned horizontally instead of all at once. At worst this can make your footage completely un-trackable. People with Dslr cameras and FlipCams and cameras labeled CMOS sensor be warned.
Ways to avoid this are:
-Avoid terribly fast pans
-Stabilize your footage.
Now I don't mean you need a tripod because that defeats the purpose of what we are trying to do here. Keep your camera steady to an extent. Eg. Steadicam, gyros, jibs, or any means of getting fluid motion.
This will minimize or nearly eliminate any smearing or skewed images.

Here is an example of rolling shutter at just about it's absolute worst.

(Photo from wikipedia, not mine)

Here is a very important tip for capturing your footage. Include points of reference in your footage so your application can better re-create this space in 3d. This means, if possible, include tracking markers that you can later mask out in After effects. Another thing I learned is to include straight vertical and horizontal lines if at all possible. This will better help you're application know what tracking points are parallel or lie on X,Y,or Z planes.

So you have your footage, now what?
Well, the next step is to convert your video stream to an image sequence. You can do this with After Effects, Quicktime Pro, or I'm sure there is plenty of free software out there. Even if your tracking application accepts video formats such as MOV, AVI or WMV, you can run into codec reading issues (h.264, ProRes, Sorenson) that can be averted by converting to a JPEG or PNG sequence.


Part 2 in next post.

It's Been Awhile...

After spending a semester working on a single project,

fresh eyes are usually needed to pick out what is working

and what isn't. It may be what you want to hear or it may

not, but it will almost always make your work better.

Usually after a few weeks of watching a finished product of

mine I can pick out nearly every flaw, blemish, or short

cut, thus making me want to do something bigger, better,

and badder. This is where I am today.


As I mentioned, I received quite a few responses to my

reel. Most of which, believe it or not, were from people in need of

video work (comping simple 3D text or Backdrop) or even asking for scoring and sound design. Ha, didn't see that one coming!  =)


For those who know me well... video is where I started - not animation. I wanted to be a film maker. I sat

in awe of the amazing works done by Peter Jackson, George

Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the like. I knew that I

absolutely wanted to be a part of this entertainment

industry. What I didn't know is where my interest in

special effects-heavy film making would lead.
Now that I've been doing video again I feel like I'm back to the beginning again so to speak. I don't know where I'm going from here but I guess I'll just keep freelancing and building my reel until I get the right job.

So what have I learned?
A bottle of rum - $10
A small sailboat - $1000
Terrible Jack Sparrow Impersonations....Priceless


I'm not sure how many people are still reading my blog but I'm going to try to update it more regularly with my freelance "adventures". I still owe people a matchmoving tutorial and I plan on also posting that today.

Motion Tracking/Capture

In the next week or two I'll be posting results and some simple tutorials on motion tracking.

Rendering

Over the last two months my project has drastically changed. As I'm sure you know (if you've been following my progress) my original plan was to make a visual effects-driven short film. BUT, due to circumstances out of my control, eg. weather, I had to change my strategy to fit the April 25 WCC Art Gala submission deadline.
For this particular deadline I decided to compile my best renders and create a show reel for my work over the past 2 semesters. Don't worry, I'll still be completing what I originally set out to do probably in the next few weeks. Anyways, Enjoy my Reel!

My 2010-11 Show Reel

Rigging

One small step for an alien robot; one giant leap for a more natural spring deformation in maya. =)

Ever animated a spring? It's quite a complicated task to recreate a realistic looking spring in maya. Just try to find an existing tutorial that isn't extremely over-complicated to create a just single spring.
I ran into this huge wall in my transformers project because I wanted to animate very realistic shocks on my robot.

Here is a preview of my rig.

I will post a tutorial of my new rig very soon. Hopefully this will save people some time in the future!

Test Shoot

Tuesday and rainy. I still got off my lazy behind anyways to do some test shooting and test my new make-shift car mount.

Test 2. (1280x720)

It turns out that each of the industrial-strength suction cups I purchased could carry my body weight. Which made me feel a tad bit safer strapping my 5D to the hood of my car.
I'm planning to start actual production within the week. Physically going out and doing it is the hardest part. Hopefully I'll be getting the helicam around soon!

Car mount test. (1280x720)

Update on my modeling.

CG Corolla Render

Autobot Render lacking Textures.

 I'm finishing up modeling and starting to texture and rig. (It's about darn time!) Until then, work, work and more work.