So lets break down what is on the front page of the studio 2 site. Did I accomplish all of my personal goals for the this project? Yes. If you look at the work break down I successfully designed, implemented, and managed an easily updateable multi user site. I also successfully completed a hard surface model of an M1A2 Abrams tank, which also textured and Uv’d. The tank while not the most highly detailed model is clean and efficient and given more time has the potential to go much further. Lastly the Match Moving….. I learned a great deal last quarter about match moving and I figured I had it all figured out…. Or so I thought. The first shot which was a jib up was very hard to track because of the limited amount of parallax. Though, the small amount of parallax Is just one of the factors that contributed to the difficulty of this shot. There where other things like missing tracking markers, footage exposed for the sky, excessive noise in the footage. At the end of the day through a combination of features in Pftrack I was able to pull a pretty good track. The other to shots in our piece that had camera moves where simple pans that where easy enough to track and only took about an hour combined to setup.
The last big part that I played in all of this was the comp and rendering of shot 5. Jesse was happy to welcome the help since he was so busy with the rest of the shots. First I had to matte paint the plate so that It fit with the rest of the shots. The plate had been taken at a different time then the footage so it need the most work out of all the shots to make it fit. After that I was able to align a camera to the perspective of the plate and start placing assets. This process of placing assets went on for several weeks as they where being completed. It culminated last night with the final assets being finished. After that I was able to spend all day to day lighting and rendering out the shot. I am fairly pleased with the job that I did with only spending a day on it.
In conclusion, we ended up only having to cut one shot and remove some of the environment destruction. I think these sacrifices sat well with everyone and were good decisions based on the time we had to complete this project. I personally would rather have a more polished piece with less stuff, then a less polished piece with more crap. Quality rather then quantity is I think the statement that fits here. Finally some other hats that I wore while part of this project where: camera alignment on static shots, assets placement and organization, camera pre-viz and asset placement, Shot list creation, basically any holes that needed to be filled, will create titles and audio. Im sure I did more but I can’t think of anything else.
Here are stills from each of the 4 shots, by Wednesday we will post a completed video:
Progress continues on the project at times slowly but always steadily. I am calling the tank final at this point because I need to move on and focus on other thing in the project. This weekend even though I said the first shot was done with tracking i went back and tweaked it a little more. I think I got some better results. Monday we are going to start placing elements and breaking down the project to get it ready for rendering. I will be taking over some of Jesse’s responsibilities on the matte painting and such. He told me over the weekend that he will be focusing his time on the animation project he is working on but still wants to help with the lighting. Below are to images from work this weekend. The first is from shot2 and is a lock off shot. I aligned the camera and placed some proxy soldiers in until the real soldiers are ready. The second image is an image final image of tank. Things can always be better and I could definitely improve it but working on it more just doesn’t fit into our timeline. Paul did show me something over the weekend that i think greatly helped my textures. It was to bake out the occlusion which i was then able to use as a mask for noise and also to increase the shading on the textures. Today I will start working on the matte painting and hopefully we will start to pull together everyone's hard work.
here is a late addition to my post i have been working on the final shot today. I got to a point where i want some input from my group before I continue so here is a render of work so far.
Yup that’s about how it goes. This weekend was all about match moving and laying out UV's. I finished the match move on all the moving shot's the camera still needs to be setup for the static shots but that should take very long. Below is an image of the Uv's that laid out for the tank. I was only concerned about the big areas for battle damage. Also will have renders of the match moves up pretty soon
final track with giant tanks! :p
This weekend has been a very busy weekend. I spent all day Friday (like 12hours) learning and tracking the first shot. It's still not done but I am about 90% of the way there. I decided even though I had good results with Realviz that I would try PFtrack on this project. I am very pleased with the results from PFtrack, I think I found the match mover that I prefer. One thing that occurred to me is that I didn't think of while planning was just how perfect this track needs to be. Nothing in our scene is moving so a jitter or sliding will be very obvious to the viewer and destroy the illusion we are trying to create. For the rest of this week I will be focusing all my energy on getting these tracks perfect because our entire project relies on them being...perfect. Some other problems that have presented themselves: I don’t have enough tracking markers in the foreground, I don’t have a focal length for this camera move, The footage is over processed and grainy (downside of low light and HDV). A lot to overcome as you can see, Below is a test video of one of the tracks that I did on Friday.
Last the tank, I finished modeling and besides a few tweaks, that I’m sure Bryan will want me to make on Monday, it's done. Modeling this tank has been really good for me and my modeling skills have definitely improved because of this project. Now it will be on to texturing which I will start to tackle as soon as I’m comfortable with the progress made on the tracks.
