VFX practice

In this blog post, I will talk about using an Autodesk program called MatchMover 2014 and explain how I used the software to bring in 3 dimensional objects from another Autodesk program called Maya 2015 into live action footage.

Recording Footage

To record what I wanted to use for MatchMover, I had used a digital SLR camera that was capable of taking video footage as well as still images; the camera I had used was a Nikon D3100.
At the introduction to this project, we had gone off to record some test footage of objects outside like benches, walls, floors, trees etc. and bring into MatchMover to track the footage.
During half term break, I had no access to the SLR camera and had to use an alternate method: phone camera. The footage was compressed and a lot of grain had appeared on it.

MatchMover

Once I had made my footage I brought it into Adobe Premiere to then convert the video file from a .mov to JPEG files. I had then booted up MatchMover and loaded the image sequence I had made, into the program. The tool in MatchMover I used was "Run Automatic Tracking" to track all potential elements in the footage. The automatic tracking places tracking points on the footage and mimics the camera movement. Sometimes if the quality is poor the tracking progress will come up as Red, meaning that it cannot be tracked. Yellow is slightly ideal for tracking however Green is the best tracking. This can be seen in the example below.

Maya

Before the file can be exported, one point on the image sequence must be selected for the camera to focus on. For this, I chose one that was near the middle of the bin as it worked the best. I renamed this so it was easily identified and went to File>Export. In the export settings I made sure "Selected" was ticked so that when it exports, it exports the one track point instead of all of them. Once in Maya I could then add 3D objects making sure they lined up with the original plains from the footage (like the bin for example).

We can now set up Render passes to then render out the animation to EXR files that would be able to open up in Composite and be manipulated around with effects.

Composite

Composite is a program by Autodesk in which any EXR files rendered from Maya can be used to make effects like alpha channels, glow channels, specular channels and many more, depending on what object is made and what effect we want to make. Below is what the workspace looks like when the EXR files are imported.

When importing the EXR files by going to File>Import then finding the EXRs as one animation file (the program automatically places the image sequence into one file), a channel will pop up with the images; this can then be scrubbed through a timeline and played normally. To add channels, the middle mouse button must be pressed and a picker will come up (the blue circle). Simply slide the mouse to the left to open up the channels to add and click and drag onto the workspace.