Smashed it, or 'burst' it rather!

Another shot got ticked off of my checklist today. I sat down this morning and in around 6-7 hours i got VFX_Burst all tracked. It is now a warm feeling to know more or less exactly what i'm trying to achieve. I really applaud the way we have all specialized in our group for this project. If i had tracked 1, 2 or even 3 shots, i still would only have a basic understanding of what i was doing.

This and the last shot are evidence to me alone that I know what i'm doing. I could explain all of my methods but i wont. Needless to say, the matchmove had its own unique problems, which i overcame by keeping a level head and just knuckling down and doing the work! Ive packaged the shot, ready for the animators (and ollie this time) and its ready to go. Here are some snapshots of the work!

to illustrate the point:

Just to re-enforce something i learned a lot earlier:

a word about communicating

Our group functions very well, but how?

I thought it might be good to show how we like to communicate, so as to prove that we are actually doing it!

Firstly, I started a group on facebook as sort of a closed message board to leave updates and other messages on. This is also a good place for us to communicate where and when we will be in to uni or if we are meeting up elsewhere. I have also just used this to communicate with the animators about their next shots:

the second useful way we communicate is through skype. We have a constant message going on, noene of us close it and we always have skype running at all times. This is helpful when having disscussions or working together on shots when physically being in the same place is not possible:

shot4....Done!

Ok so i think im really getting the hang of this now. This was a really nice shot to match as it is a very geometric one. Not alot of useless detail in this one. I started with the pre-modelled corridor i made a while ago. This is the exact thing i wanted to match to so i simply tracked a few sensible points on my plate and matched up 4 or five to the model. All though this was quite a timley process (4-5 hours for some nice tracks) I felt like i knew exactly what i was doing the whole time. and then when it all matched up, i wasnt supprised like before, more relieved that everything i had planned for made sence! So i have packaged this shot and it and the renderfarm shot are ready for the animators as soon as they need them! Here are some images of the work.

Time i showed you the checklist!

It just occured to me this morning that the checklist i have been using for the shots has never been seen by the light of day!!! So here it is in all its pride and glory:
 

VFX SHOT	STATUS	DESCRIPTION
01.CanaryWarf	On hold	A comet is seen destroying part of the canary warf building
02.Atrium	On hold	Creatures are seen entering the atrium
03.Stairs	matched	A creature approaches via the stairs on level 2/3
04.Balcony	matched	A creature crawls up through the gap in the balcony on level 3
05.RenderFarm	matched	A creature runs at the renderfarm window and cracks the glass
06.Corridor	–	A creature approaches through the door and bears down on the party
07.Burst	–	The creature breaks out of the renderfarm
08.Corridor2	–	A second view of corridor creature, still approaching
09.StudioDoor	–	A creature forces its way into the studio with ollie
10.Demise	–	The creature is seen attacking ollie
11.Media	–	Multiple creatures are seen prowling the media room, no exit here!
12.Final Burst	–	A creature bursts through from the studio at the camera. END.

 

New Shot, New Problems

I had read a while ago that you will need to treat each matchmove differently, and i am starting to see that this is true. I aslo read that there are two types of matchmover, the logical and the artistic. The logical matchmover will use all available information to solve a shot, and if no information is present, make educated guesses about length and distances ect. then there are the artistic kind that will engineer solutions to solve problems.

I have just finished my third matchmove and it has been fraught with problems. Firstly the shot was very shakey, the second, there were very few good tracks. After trying and giving up on an easy auto track solution, I tried a few well placed manual tracks. this held no solution to anything as i could not track forward or back for more than a frame or 2. After literally spending a day on this, I thought do or die. I manually tracked every keyframe for every track on this shot. here is the proof. And let me tell you, it was the only way!

So after a long time doing this i finally got a nicely solved co-ordinate system working in matchmover. Now I had the usual task of balancing the focal length of the shot with the real measured geometry and blocking it all in. I had another problem here. Due to the huge lack of trackable information, or due to the poorness of the tracked points, the deapth would not sync with the real geo 100%. and by 100% i mean, one plane of geometry.

everything was messured fine, and no ammount of unrealistic edits to the geo would solve this problem for every frame. Finally i resorted to animating a planar surface to hold this troublesome edge. I have predicted that this will solve our problem however time will tell, and i have no problem re-tackeling this problem if it turns out i have not solved this problem yet.

But this shot has now been packaged and is ready to be taken by the animators! on to shot 4!!!

Two Shots Done!!!

Ok so after leaving the harder atrium shot i got on very well with this shot which I name VFX_StairShot.

the stair shot involved some new challenges as I only had on-set messurements for the geometry behind the camera itself. Now this wasnt necessarily a bad thing. By taking a few more messurements such as step height and depth I just went through starting with the first step in view at the bottom of the shot and modelled out the basic shape, which ''looked right'' in my head. Then i colour corrected m plates as i find this a huge help when auto tracking.

I then tracked and in 2D and solved the camera, imported and it was more or less right. Using a few relations i further corrected this and in around 1 and a half working days I got this shot tracked. I think the total time for this shot was between 12 and 16 hour, a considerable amount of time less than the last 24 to 30 hour first shot. This is good as it shows I am developing. I know These times are no where near proffesional yet. For instance in the book i am reading, It mentions a few times that a matchmover might spend 3 to 4 hours tracking a shot. But I am learning. and not just learning to submit this uni work, Im leaning to learn!


I arranged the scene similar to the first as this got good feedback from my team and from my tutor who approved the use of text and instructions embeded.

Here is a quick render of cubes in situ. nothing special obviously, just a pre-vis or test.

Ive been hard at work!

ok needless to say, i havnt blogged in a while. but that dosnt by any means mean that i havnt been busy!

so this post will fill you in on what ive been up to. I started, after the last matchmove sucsess, with  high hopes on the large atrium shot. This went really well until it went badddddddd. I started with lots of nice well done, well thought out tracks which turned out nicely. Only certain areas needed to be manualy keyframed in clusters, so that was refreshing!. check it out, looks nice huh!:

Ok so then i solved for parralax. Nope. Nada. No paralax here. well ok there is a little.

around the balconys and doors there are a fair amout of simultanious movements that could technically be calculated but there are no strong tracking points there due to motion blur on the camera. So basically the result i came out with was a non-sensical model of the atrium which pulled in and out of accuracy as the shot went on. Rubbish. after a bit of playing i made a managerial descision to pass over this shot until a later date. I believe that with some more practical learning in mm-ing i will find other tips and tricks to help me solve this shot nicely.