Well, looks like someone fell off the blogging wagon… Bit silly of me as I’ve done an awful lot the past couple of months and I may well have remembered more of the techniques if I’d blogged about them at the time, however… what’s done is done. I’ll just have to make up for it now.
First of all, I’ve been learning about tracking. I created this reel for an application to a Matchmover/Tracker freelance job at a company that I really want to work for, but unfortunately the job was taken down a day before the reel was ready. Sod’s Law in action, yet not a completely wasted effort as I now have a reasonable grasp on tracking techniques where previously I knew nothing.
01 – Camera Tracking
In this one I finally finished the “shoe” project from the first semester of the Master’s. It was in equal parts nice and mortifying opening the file for the first time in eight months: nice, because I realised I’ve learned so much since then; mortifying because I’ve learned so much since then and by my higher standards the file was a mess.
– The Displacement map didn’t work first time around so I chucked it before the final render – I now know how Displacement maps work (32 bit depth ONLY; really neat UVs; Vector Displacement maps where possible because they are SO much more stable), so I set myself the challenge of getting it to work this time, which it did fairly easily compared to last time.
– I cheated with the reflection on the table the first time by just flipping the shoe – it worked, but I wanted to do it properly this time as that particular method won’t hold when dealing with animated characters (unless you Cache Geometry, then flip it, but still… messy).
I was literally stuck on this one for days, even though I knew that the answer when I finally figured it out would be really simple, and it was. It involved going into the mip_matteshadow shader, and ticking a box called “Reflection.”
I blame the naming conventions. It wouldn’t have been as hard if mip_matteshadow was renamed to mip_DOES_EVERYTHING-NOT_JUST_SHADOWS. Maybe it’s just me…
– I also used Linear Workflow and sub-surface scattering when creating the lighting and shaders, which I didn’t last time.
Compared to that lot, actually tracking the scene in NukeX seemed relatively easy. I roto’d out the middle of the table as the markers seemed to be sliding around a lot there, then steadily deleted markers to get the Average Tracking Error below 1 (0.581, in this case), while making sure the total number of trackers stayed above the minimum 100 required for a stable track.
02 – Object Tracking
This was a nightmare! Also, my first time tracking using Autodesk Matchmover, which I’m told is used quite often in industry. There’s a lack of decent tutorials in Object Tracking so I had to more-or-less wing it. The main difficulty was the busy background, as well as the fact that the markers would often disappear during the sword’s rotation. I had eight tracks in all, a large portion of which was done manually because Matchmover couldn’t pick the markers out from the background. The sword asset was from the Digital Tutors Asset Library and was particularly useful in that the fact it was glowing meant the lighting accuracy was less important. I did find and use a similar HDRI from HDR Labs, though.
03 – Planar Tracking
Compared to the other two this was very simple, and once I’d watched the tutorial on how it was done it only took about ten minutes to do. The tracking and replacement was done completely within NukeX.
So there you go – my tracking reel. I’ll be updating with more posts over the next few days, including Non-Organic Modelling, Multi-Tile Workflows, and my first ever VFX job…!
Bye for now,
S.
Cell Shading 