Monday 28 March 2011

My Shots



001



003

002 was assigned to a different member in the group to do.

Thursday 24 March 2011

Compositing





For both shots I exported Moom as a .Tiff Sequence and imported it into Affect Effects. Then imported the movie in with him.
Placing both into the composite I arranged so they were still in time.

Placing effects over both of them I gray scaled them. As we are doing our film in black and white. Using the Curves function I tweet the contrast to blend Moom more with scene.

In the second shot I had to Mask Moom slightly so he went behind some of the trees. I just had to apply a mask, I explain the whole process for this in my Research post on PFtrack. I repeated the same process as I stated there, obvious cutting out the trees instead of the chair this time.

Lightening



Noticeable more in PFTracker is my lightening I added to each shot. For them I added an ambiant light to each scene. Then tweek with the setting so Moom blended into the shot's lighting. By blending Moom in it looks like hes actually meant to be in the shot more. The final animation is in Black and White meaning that lighting effect should show up more cause of the contrast of White, Black and Gray.

I simply place a light in each shot and move it high above Moom, then adjusted its postion so it matched the natural light of the shot.

Work from Maya





Here are a few sreenshots from my shots in Maya.

The first shot is showing just a pers view of the shot. The second shot is showing the view from the camer. When I was animating the shot I had the panels set up in the third printscreen, (viewing both the pers and camera view at the same time) this way I could move Moom in pers and see how he looked in the camera view. The last shot is having a third panel so I could edit Moom face features anytime I liked and could set the pers view to look at his face to makes things easier.

Working in the camera view did let me resize and postion Moon correctly, but having pers view open at the same time made it possible to move around Moom, without messing up the camera view.

Here are a couple more shots from my other shot:


Research - PFtrack

Next I done some animation on Moom and added it to a clip of live footage. The only problem with the outcome was that the contrast changes in the footage on the chair and the image mask I used on the footage doesn't match up exactly, but it looks nearly right.

Started by taking 30 seconds of footage of a stationary chair, which Moom would later be sitting in. To make things a bit interesting gave the camera a bit of shake, instead of applying it digitally I did it manually whilst recording.



After taking the footage I important it in to a program called PFTrack. Which creates tracking points in the footage, so when you place something into the scene it moves with the camera correctly, so in the case of my research, even tho the camera is shaking Moom is staying in the chair and not being displayed from the camera.





Exporting this file at a .ma file, I can open it up in Maya. When opened in Maya it sets up the video background and the tracking points.



All the orange crosses are the tracking points, and the video plays when running the time line in Maya. The next step is importing Moom in to Maya. Once he was imported I made a rough polygon the same shape as the chair and posed Moom in it, after that I animated Moom a bit. Just had him yawning and moving his head. Didn't do too much as the purpose of this research is just to use PFtrack and import 3D models into video footage.




So now we have Moom sitting in the chair, in the second print screen we have a ambient lightening on Moom, so the light directing in the movie footage reflects on him and makes the affect effects stage easier.



The above is a quick playblast of the animation so far. Just to check that it looked alright to use, I mainly like the middle section just before Moom yawns, the start and end could of done with a bit more work.

After exporting the Maya file as a .tiff seq I important that and the video file into Affect effects. Dropping them both into a new composite. The last part to do was the mask on the chair to make it look like Moom was actually in the chair. This was done by rendering the chair out of one of the frame of the film.



This was import to affect effects. Then using the track in affects effects, I did a quick track of the movie file again. Then made a null layer for the track to be applied to, then parented the null to the image layer with the chair on. Using masks I then was able to clip parts of Moom out of the shot.



Exported the film as a .avi, for uploading to Youtube, then uploaded the film to youtube. Sadly cause of YouTube problems with all the other codexs I used I had to use AVI and the frame rate and video size was altered.



The finished outcome:



PFtracker made this whole process quick and track really efficiently. Compared to the tracker in affect effects, PFtrack cut down the time it need by about 10 fold. Plus it could do the whole shot in the same time it took me to track just one part.

Research - Green Screening



Tried out a bit of Green Screening, so I had the experience working with the camera and after affects. I had Russell film me whilst just standing there and talking about, moving slightly left to right. First thing that went wrong here, was the green light coming from the light ring on the camera. It was a bit too much, so it did colour my shadow slightly.



Important the clip into Affect effects, and added a mask around me, to clip off the edges as the green screen I used wasn't big enough to fill up the whole camera frame.



Placed a static image under the movie layer, this image is the image I wanted to be placed. Next I open up Keylight, an addon in affect effects, to key out the color green. It removes parts of the clip the same colour of the colour you tell it to remove, so for this footage I remove the bright green you can see behind me. Thus:



Now got me on the image I put in. The only problem, like I stated earlier, was that my shadow I couldn't correct fully. Not having enough time to redo the footage, I had to keep this outcome.