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.