Second bit of dragon footage and animation, not finished

 

Using the same technique as the previous animations I had put both dragons into the .ma camera solve from Boujou and put the skeleton seperately so I can animate it easier.

I then had two dragons animated flying past each other as the camera moves away from the scene they would come into view.

I textured the second dragon differently and had it fly towards the screen after it had flown past the first dragon.

Here are some screen captures before rendering.

A playblast need to do some more then batch render it using mental ray :)

New part of animation

I have decided to add an extra part to this animation, I will use two dragons for this.. I hope to find this challenging and hope the end product is entertaining and will enhance what I've already done.

My idea is to have one dragon floating and spraying fire and the other to fly across the screen. More to come in the coming week.

First Draft

http://youtu.be/rswpsL9ynqo

Second test dragon animation

I made a second test animation using the same technique I had used for the first.

I decided to have the dragon breathing fire so I created a video sequence of a flamethrower type effect using a can of deodorant and match and recording it next to a black piece of cardboard so I could key that color out and put it into the footage using After Effects tracking software.

I ended up with this.

 

I then created a null object and

attached the sequence to the null object I then assigned it to track the motion of the head. Then changed the transparency settings to get rid of the black outline, I felt it gave a good result.

And this is the finished product.

http://youtu.be/J7ukkJbMbnQ

Title Sequence

I decided to have a dark background for my news title sequence, but I wanted it to seem like a world news channel so I chose this image.

I then had to decide what font to use, I decided to use a newspaper clippings font to give it a comic feel as the animation wasn't the most realistic, so a comic feel throughout would fit the piece overall.

 I added rotation to the text and decided to put a footer with the headline the news story would be about which would stay there throughout the animation.

I'm quite happy with this title sequence and I think it adds a bit of a story to the animation that I plan to do.. next on my list to to make a better animated and more perfected render of the test then have the dragon model in other locations so over the next week or so gonna get the camera out and do some more filming.

Title Sequence

This week I decided to make the title sequence for the news story which would precede the videos of dragons around London.

I have not finished it yet but this is the kind of things I was going for, I was thinking of adding fake twitter posts to make it seem like an actual story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp8BWWfDIRo

Boujou test

I got my hands on a working copy of Boujou 4 so decided to test it out, find out what worked and didn't work and make a little test animation. This took about 3 days and in the course I kind of got lost along the way so if I leave anything out and you want to try this out yourself I'd follow this tutorial I found online which I found very informative and helpful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5XFCO_jHXE

Ok so first I put the footage I took into After Effects and turned it into a jpeg image sequence so it can be transferred easily between the 3 programs I was going to use.

I made sure the frame rate was 30fps as that is the standard frames per second of Maya and After Effects, by the way some of this footage I have not used in the test but may use later.

This is the footage I used.

I then tracked the motion and made a camera solve in Boujou 4, this was surprisingly easier than I expected it to be and I was pleasantly surprised as to the accessibility of this program, great job Boujou, Autodesk take note.

I basically just clicked on track features and then on create camera solve. I ended up with a 3D space which would be a very simple imitation of the environment of the footage I took.

I then exported the camera solve as a .ma making sure it's in the format of Maya 4+ and I was ready to import it into my Maya scene file. And that is where it got difficult.

What you will end up with is an animated image plane that will play a sequence and a moving camera, the camera solve will have made a basic virtual space to dictate where you can put 3D objects to make them fit into your scene, for some reason I had a lot of trouble with this footage no matter what I did so I cut the video down. I may use different video footage for the final product.

I made several layers for the animated dragon to fit into the scene these were all rendered in .tga so I could put them directly back into After Effects. I made a color layer, alpha layer and shadow layer.

The color layer was to show just the color in the scene and nothing else. Here is a screen shot of the color layer, I had to take out the background also.

The Alpha layer a black and white image of the silhouette of the dragon. This was to correct the color and to create dynamic shadows.

To create this I used a "usedbackground" and a "surfaceshader"

This is the alpha map of the dragon

I then made the shadow layer this was just to make the shadowing so all color was turned to white so the ending render would only focus on the dark shadows created by the virtual spot light.

They were all connected to a masterlayer, this is what the scene file looked like before being rendered.

So yeah after that I put it into After Effects and added each layer onto the original footage I had taken. However for whatever reason a white square appeared so I attempted to mask it out, and it was still rather shaky so I will keep experimenting to try and get it right, as stated I might just use more still footage as the footage I recorded had quite a lot of movement.

And this was the final product, still needs work but quite happy with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5fbxtA9Ybs&feature=youtu.be

3D model into live footage test

Because I have been unable to obtain Boujou yet I decided to do a simple test this week on how to import 3D models into live footage.. I had never previously done this before so was important to find this out. Firstly I had to turn on the OBJ exporter in maya. For whatever reason it is turned off by default.

I then exported the OBJ files so I could use them in photoshop so I could turn it into a file that would be easily accessible in After Effects.

Not know to many is the fact that photoshop is capable of basic 3D effects, unfortunately this took quite a lot of quality off the rendering off the dragon but as this was just a simple test I decided to go with it and see what I could create.

In After effects I had a simplified version of my 3D model and decided to add it to some stock footage I had filmed earlier in the week. I then used after effects simple yet slightly effective tracking software to change the position and scale so it would kinda fit..

This is what I ended up with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_v67Lnomk0&feature=youtu.be

It still seems a lot out of place but as it was just a simple test I was quite happy with the results, I will try to get Boujou again this week and work on this some more perhaps with different footage.

As I was writing this I have just found a hopefully working Boujou file so will get started on that tomorrow.

How to move the model into real life footage

I have decided to research now how I'm going to put this dragon into real life footage, I have researched several video related tracking softwares so the model will look like it is meant to be in the footage and not look jerky or unrealistically put in.

I am looking at Boujou as a program to use to track the 3D model to the live footage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PsGdjwht_A

I have decided to create some video footage today and try this tutorial to try and make it work. I am just going to have the dragon just there in the street not doing anything as a test and I hope to put it up on this blog by the end of the week.

My dragon will in all probability not be as frightening or anywhere near as realistic as a Hollywood production but I have singled out "Reign Of Fire" as my main source of inspiration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxJg7Gyxvhg

Would be amazing if I could make anything close to this.

Rigging the dragon

I found rigging this model quite hard as I had only ever had experience of rigging a humanoid model so  thinking about where to put the joints was quite hard. I took two screen shots off me rigging it t begin with and one of me painting the weights. I split the head and neck skeleton from the rest of the body as I found easier to animate this way, here are two screen shots of the rigging development. 

After that I started painting the weights of the joints so they only affected parts of the model that I wanted them too.. This was a very time consuming process as it was such a high polygon model. 

As you can see the body joints I decided wouldn't affect the neck...

And the neck and head joints wouldn't affect the body. 

The Dragon - early picture

Introduction

Visual effects or VFX is the process where something is edited, manipulated or created to change the effect and/or context of a live action shoot.

For this module I will be making a short video where vfx will be used, I have decided to mainly use Maya and After Effects for my project.

I have decided to attempt to integrate a 3D model into live footage, the 3D model in question being a dragon I have been working on since the end of July, I want to integrate it into live footage I have yet to record but I hope the outcome will be entertaining to make and to view.