3d Match Moving Assignment

Awright! Finally down to the match moving/CG integration! So during the summer my friend Scott and I filmed a really quick 1 minute short about me running like a lunatic with a Nerf gun trying to get to the last helicopter leaving to safety whilst the neighborhood around me was under siege by giant alien space-ships...and...Drones! I drew up a concept piece for Scott who then modeled it in Maya and sent it over.

Tracked it in Maya's Match Moving software (first time for me using that software and it went surprisingly painlessly!) and brought it straight into Maya where I tried to keep things to their bare essentials. I really still suck at lighting and texturing so I tried to hide it with the fact that obviously there would be a ton of crap going on to hopefully distract you, but I dropped in the model, textured it with this red, rusty texture I found (the drone was initially going to be very shiny...but then I realized how much harder that would be if it had to reflect everything around it...) and then threw in some lights. The first shot has only one ambient light sorta behind it, while the 2nd shot actually has some directional light hitting it from the backend to kinda give it a light wrap from the "sun". It took quite a lot of messing around and I'm still not convinced I did anything correctly, but I managed to use a still-frame of the shot as the Color File for the lights and just messed with Eye-dropping different samples of the footage to sort of match the colors.

Then exported and brought into AE where I did the compositing and Color Correction. For next time I really need to just export the model by itself so I can properly layer it on top of the elements...for example in the first shot I wanted the car-bomb explosion to be behind the drone but since it was all 1 piece (and I didn't feel like doing some roto) I had to slide it over to the left to avoid having the flames "on top" of the drone as it turned around.

Secondly, after a few test renders I realized in the initial renders of the 2nd shot I had too much movement going on for a mere 31 frame animation. I simplified it and tried working with the curves editor (but my damn mouse middle click sucks so I couldn't adjust anything...) and ended up trying to do pseudo curves with the keyframes to mimic the "distance" it had to travel - i.e. making it come from the background more slowly and appear faster as it flew towards camera.

The one thing I wish I could do (and I'll probably ask you Ben) was to move the locaters from Matchmove into After Effects. I'd already got a pretty solid track from Matchmove and it'd be nice if I didn't have to track again, in AE or a 3rd party program, for the other VFX components.

 Final Composite!

Light wrap around the back, but pretty unimpressive texturing and lighting...=/

Dunno what all that artifacting is but as you can see it's nothing amazing...just all hidden!

Drone Shot VFX from kabraz on Vimeo.