Tim Hawker Match Moving Blog

Final Render

Here is the final render for my matchmoving project 3. There are definitely some issues with it, and had I known what I know now I would have done things very differently. All in all, I’ve learnt bucket loads!

I really like the way the arm dissolves away and I’m really happy with that part.

There is however some jerky movement making the cg bone jump around a little especially towards the end. I’ve tried to resolve this as much as possible by hand correcting it in each frame but it’s really hard to do this without making it look worse! It probably wasn’t a good idea to use such jerky footage as it proved incredibly difficult to track.

Still, it’s been a fun project to work on and I’ve really enjoyed working on it.

Let there be smoke!

I want my arm to dissolve away to show the bones underneath, and decided turning into smoke would be a good way of acheiving this. I used 3ds Max’s particle flow emitter, and created a customised particle flow chart to produce the desired result. I’ve found a really good way of creating very realistic smoke with friendy render times :) The arm dissapearing was created by animating a material to have a white strip move down it, and the particles are only emmitted when the material is white. I masked out the original footage as the smoke moved down, to reveal a layer underneath with the bone render and rotoscoped footage.

Rotoscoping - Part 2

Hours upon countless hours were spent tediously removing the arm from the footage using various tools in After Effects. I took a still frame, clone brushed out my arm, and used the Motion Track tools to track the still along with the video. I then masked out the frame to just where the arm was. Lots of touched up frames were requried as this is a rotating shot. I really had to think about how to do this and went though countless alternatives before arriving at this solution. It works well, although you can see where the geometry doesn’t match very well. This will however be a lot less obvious when I’ve added all the various effects to the composition.

Rotoscope - Part 1

In order to remove the tracking points I used the After Effects Motion Tracker Tool. This produced a really nice result and only requied a few extra keyframes over the entire animation to ensure it stayed in the correct place.

The Motion Tracker Tool was used to track position, rotation and scale changes, and the white markers proved very useful for this.

Adding the Bones

I found a really good free skeleton model to use for this project. I deleted all the unneeded bones and quickly created a rig so I could animate the hands and wrotate the wrist.

After that I carefully aligned it up to the scene, making sure it was in the correct place. I had to add quite a few keyframes to try and prevent some track shaking.

I’m happy with the resulting geometry track. There are a few problems with it, especially when considering rotation, but this can be tweaked using keyframs in 3ds Max.

Free Move Footage

EDIT: No idea why it’s been published here. I wrote this one first. Odd.

Here is the footage I will use for my free move tracking project. It’s very jerky and should present quite a challenge, but I’d like to push myself on this one.

It was filmed on an HVX200 with a focal length of 4.8mm, shutter speed of 1/2000th second and aperature of f3.4 at 720p 50fps. Thanks to Ben for helping me out with the filming.

We chose to film on a bright day with a very high shutter speed and frame rate to help as much as possible with the track.

White tape has been placed on my arm to allow geometry track points (well, that’s the plan).

I plan to completely remove my arm and composite a new arm in. I’m not too sure what yet though.

Wireframe Render

Due to the very quick uv unwrapping I performed on the geometry the checkers are a little wonky and don’t line up. Here is a wireframe render to show that everything matches up as it should.