Masking Video 1

Another section a little more done.

This is certainly one of the more challenging compositing pieces I have done so far.

To start with I had to composite out the arm which was no longer going to be present in the footage. This was a painstaking process that sometimes required going in frame by frame and manually roto-scoping the mask.

Of course this left no data behind the mask for Aftereffects to work off of which required me to take a still frame of the actors hand and move it along with the rest of his body. Because he remained in a very controlled position through the whole sequence, his hand and arm stayed relatively still which made my job significantly easier. 

 Finally I needed a stand in for his gi top, which was no easy task because there was simply no easy data that could be readily applied. For this I took another still image shortly before his hand had occluded his top and masked out the portion I needed. Then I keyed the scaling, position, opacity, path.... pretty much every attribute, and painstakingly moved it to match the top as it moved with his body. Than using the match-moving function in Aftereffects, I tracked a null object onto the top of one of his patches and from there was able to use that as a base for my transformations, giving me a far smoother transition.

So it has already been done!

The question had been previously asked whether anyone had used lights to track motion, which is something that we had originally intended for the match moving portion of the project as a last minute alternative to to tape marks. After doing some Youtubing, it turns out that this studio had infact used a similar technique that we had intended to use, building a L.E.D. rig to triangulate the position of the cameras. Somehow they had also incorporated iPhones into the mix, which seems to be a common trend in almost any hip project these days.

Test Footage of MatchMoving and Masking Processes.

Test footage of match moving and masking processes used in the special effects project.

Masking

So this is the technique that I have determined will be best for special effects project. This is actually a combination of two techniques.

1. The first technique is to rotoscope the arm on the places that they are on the black background, then you can simply place a black solid on the from underneath and you have yourself a missing arm.

2. The second technique needs  a bit more effort. When the arm moves in front of his uniform it becomes necessary to paint each individual frame in photoshop. Since the video slows down to 59.95 frames per second it makes it quite  few frames. For this I export the exact portion that needs to be painted, then paint it in and bring in the image sequence.

Getting the Hang of Match Mover

Autodesk MatchMover is most certainly one of the most aggravating programs ever created. This is certainly not the forum to air my grievances however. I will tell you what I have learned about the program and some of the small kinks in it's system that will really get you down, as well as an update on my progress.

Some issues and tips-

1. Never Use Automatic Tracking- I found that the most effective way, even though it may be time consuming, to track the footage is to find individual points of contrast and track them using hard tracks. I found that if you define a beginning point, then go forward and track back from there to fill in the gaps, it can streamline the process. The automatic tracking function is more of an accuracy by volume approach as we would have called it in the Army. It projects sometimes thousands of points that are far from accurate and that leads to a shaky and inaccurate camera.

2. Shift Select in the timeline selects a whole chunk of points, Control Shift deselects them. I got so hung up trying to deselect the dragging selection box......lets just say it took a long time to figure that one out.

3. Camera Solving- You need at least 4 points to at any given time in the timeline to solve for the camera as long as you know the focal length of the lens that the film the movie was shot with. If you don't know then the program needs 7 computations points at any given time. Luckily for this past project I had collected camera data and measurements from the film crew so it made it far easier.

Below is a screen shot of just one of the parts of one of the match moving clips. All of the tracks are hard tracks focused on the pieces of tape placed on the backdrop.

Shading Update

Crossposted from my progress blog:

I will be developing a procedural shader for the shatter effect until Week 7. Here are the ideas I've brainstormed: ruby, ice, glowskin, cement, parchment, brick, tribal tattoo, volcanic... To give you an idea of the aesthetic of the film, here is a screenshot:



I created three tests so far. Tomorrow I present them to Kirk and the group. If they don't like them, I will try more of my ideas. The tricky thing is that I was originally imagining glass or something with a lot of caustics, but the way that the short is lit doesn't really provide an environment for good reflections. Here's an example of the predicament:



The ice shader that I created has this problem of fading into the background due to dark reflections. One solution is to give it an ambient, glowing quality. I'm afraid that that may look really cheesy and unrealistic. Another solution may be to rough up the ice, like frosted glass.



Next is volcanic. I like this one! It borders on the edge of totally cheeseball, but I think it fits the martial arts/nature/silent rage thing and the red contrasts nicely against the blue tones.



Lastly, I'm calling this one tribal tattoo. Before anyone accuses me of reusing the spirally thing! - yes, I did. I think a spirally, organic shape ties in to the theme really well. I plan on developing it more (you can still sort of see that it's a marble shader...), but I like the idea. For this one, i would LOVE to go crazy and make the tattoo an animated snake or dragon or something, but I don't think it's possible with the way the UVs will be. Check out the animated test to see what I have in mind for the transition:





It's also my job to figure out how these textures would transition from normal skin in a natural, interesting way. I thought I had it down pat with an ambient occlusion node that would creep the texture over the edges, but it wasn't working as well as I'd hoped. If that's the style we want, I'll have to find another way, but the direction I am going in now is more like the test above.

Meeting with Programmers

I met with Ben Cumings yesterday evening to talk about how things are going so far.  They've decided to stick with an FBX file format for importing and exporting.

Interface:
We no longer need to give them any animation, just points of impact and amount of force.  They should have it set up to allow multiple points of impact to allow us to create different kinds of effects.  When they've finished we'll sit down with them and they'll guide us through their interface until we get the shattered geometry we're looking for.

Timeline:
By the end of week six they will be done with an implementation that works for everything except the UV map and normals.  At the end of week 8 they'll have that stuff finished.  This will be great for our testing period.  We can try using some shattered geometry they give us and see how it works without the proper UVs and normals.  it may work out being more appropriate to simply use Maya's built in shatter algorithm at this point, we'll have to see how it goes.

Video Edit Complete

This post is a bit late, but the video edit is finished.  I've uploaded all of the footage and Adobe Premiere Pro files to our rendershare.

Ready to Start Match Moving!

I have got to tell you, it has been hard finding good resources for match-moving tutorials, but there is one pretty good tutorial put out by an Australian man on YouTube. It is a 14 part series of 15 minute videos but if you put them on a playlist then they will play one after another and it isn't to bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OAU7Fs3glA

The steps that I need to take now include processing the footage, bringing it into matchmover, tracking the footage, exporting the cameras to Maya, then passing the scene files out the rest of the team and start on the compositing portion of the project.

Footage

I got the footage from Ben last night.  I watched through all of it, and it is REALLY good.  It's all at 1080p and 720p, so it's all about 35 gigs.  We definitely need some server space somewhere so that we have a large enough repository that everyone has access to.  As soon as we figure it out, I'll let you guys know.  I'll be working on the video edit this week (see timeline).

Time Management

I'm not sure if any of you have issues with personal time management, but I recently discovered this great tool called Slimtimer.  You go to the website, http://slimtimer.com/, and you create a free account.  You'll get a sidebar window that has a 'timer' for every task you spend a lot of time doing at your computer.  When you sit down you can start a timer and keep track of how long you've been doing it.  From the website you can get reports on how much time you've spent on each task in the past day, week or month.
For example, you could make a timer for 'Homework', 'Projects', and 'Play/Relax', and make sure that you're not spending too much time goofing off.

Try it out if you're interested.  I made a timer for this special effects project, and I've clocked 49.28 hours in the past two and a half weeks!

Filming

Filming was amazing on Friday night!
I was completely blown away by the entire experience, everyone did an incredible job.  It really reminded me that mediocrity really doesn't exist in our team.  Every single member is an expert at their specialty.

FILMING:
When I arrived on set, Ben Disinger, our film maker from the School of Film and Animation, was with a crew of about five people that he assembled.  They were in the middle of setting up for filming, which included a track for the camera, a huge black curtain for the background, four spotlights, two rim lights, a fill light, and a special HUGE light filter that they built themselves out of PVC pipe, some white flame retardant cloth, and a short black curtain.  When it was all finished, the lighting looked amazing.  I was very impressed that they were able to light the actors and their black uniforms such that they could be easily distinguished from the black background.

The first half of the final sequence is just the two actors fighting, and the second half of the final sequence is all special effects shots.  I was concerned because our 3D team had camera angles laid out for the special effects portion, but no ideas for the rest of the sequence.  I was very happy to find that Ben Disinger had some amazing ideas for opening shots, and his team had even already laid down some tracks for a dolly.

DIRECTING:
During the filming, Ben acted as a director.  He kept his team organized and was great with guiding the talent to get the best shots possible.  I did some directing of my own in the sense that I had a better idea of what we needed to capture than Ben.  Occasionally I would ask the actors for specific poses, actions, or fighting speeds, and occasionally I would ask the film makers for certain camera angles.

ACTING/CHOREOGRAPHY:
The actors were among the last to arrive on set, though we still had plenty of time to rehearse before the film team was finished setting up.  It's a little unfair to simply call these men 'actors', because that barely begins to describe their contribution to this project.  These men are in their 30s and 40s, are black belts, have been doing Kuk Sool for a significant portion of their lives, and are instructors at a dojang in Webster.  These men are amazing at martial arts, fun to work with, and very willing to help us to get the shots and style we're looking for.

A related anecdote regarding their skill that comes to mind is when Ben and his crew were pulling focus for a certain shot.  Ben and his crew had set up marks for focusing when the actors move toward and away from the camera, but expected that the film crew would have to adjust the focus slightly as the actors would not likely land in the same exact places on each take.  Ben was surprised to find that adjustments were never needed, and exclaimed "How do you do that?" with regards to the actor's precision.

The actors had a routine for set up for us, that we discussed when we met with them last week.  Rachel invited a guy named Andrew (I don't know his last name), who's specialty is martial arts filming and editing.  Andrew worked with the actors to help make their moves look more pronounced on camera.  I will admit that I was not actually expecting him to be there, but was impressed with the quality that he added to the fight sequence.

COMPOSITING:
I am thrilled to see how invested Joel has become ever since he started on compositing work for the sequence.  He did a lot of research and showed up very prepared for making sure that we're able to track the camera and actor's arm using tracking software.  Throughout the filming Joel walked around with a tape measure and notepad taking various measurements.  Under his direction, we set up tracking marks on the background for the camera tracking, and even filmed some shots with tracking marks on the actor's arm.

PRODUCTION:
Indirectly, none of this could have happened without Rachel.  She spent a lot of the evening sitting in the background, so to some it may be easy to forget everything she's contributed so far, and I want to stress what she did for us.  Rachel found us an excellent  film maker, two great actors, and an experienced choreographer.  All of these people had a significant impact on the look of the final sequence, and none of it would have been there without Rachel's help.  She was also nice enough to split the cost of three pizzas with me for everyone on set.

MODELING:
There wasn't all that much that really needed to be done in terms of modeling, but it was still nice to see Evan show up and see what's going on.  He was taking some reference photos and movies, which is great.

Match Moving

Wow. This is certainly going to be a challenge. We have run into a number of problems that we seem to have found solutions to, however it is far to soon to make assumptions.

1.Tracking the Background
In order to be able to create a proper 3D environment to place the models in it will be necessary to have track points in that environment. Match Moving relies on taking points of contrast and then calculating how they change across the different frames, then using that data it is able to triangulate the location of the camera. Although using an all black background will allow us some freedom in the compositing, it makes it difficult to get points that will be a reference for the camera's movement. That is why we are going to use an array of Christmas lights arranged in the background. It will be dark enough where that is all that will be showing. In this way we can use the lights as track points. Later in the compositing phase we can simply mask them out.

2.Tracking the arm
In addition to the camera movement, an arm will also have to be tracked in some way to ensure that the 3D elements are properly matched as well as to act as a reference for the rotoscoped mask of the arm that will disappear. This will be done using the same camera and the same track, but with different tracking points that will then we imported into Maya as locators. In this way we can match the movement of the arm exactly and use it to project the texture onto the polygonal stand ins.

So there is certainly a lot ahead of us. I am sure that we will be able to pull it off though.

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