Tracking Along to Matte Painting!

This week Professor Glover was back and the fun began again!  We took an indepth look at tracking in After Effects and Maya and setting up the environment via Maya and Photoshop.

AFTER EFFECTS

We cna now take  the footage that we have already edited in Final Cut and After Effects prior and attach a tracker to it in After Effects. Begin by placing the clip into the timeline. Go to Layer>New>Null Object and rename as “Track One”. Highlight the footage and go to Window>Tracker (Tracker will open in a new dialogue box):

Highlight footage and hit the “track Motion” button. Move the newly opened tracker box in the comp window over the characters face (adjust as needed). When you are ready hit “Edit Target”, making sure the tracker is set to Track One (the null object) and finish by pressing “Analyze: Play Button”. If you are happy with the track, you can apply and ok the tracker on the x and y dimensions!  

We will now take this step a little farther by adding a camera. First, create a box shape over the character’s torso and parent the shape to the null object. Go to Layer>New>Camera and make sure that the camera is set to a 36mm (standard size). Click on the 3D layer button in the timeline for the solid object to set it as a proxy track layer. Your timeline should now look like this:

 Now, go to After Effects>Preferences>General and make sure that the allow script button option is checked on. Highlight the proxy track and camera.   Got to File>Scripts>Run Script File and select the file that the Professor supplied. In the export options, make sure that the “Add 4 views” option is selected and save the file before exporting.

The final step is creating a secondary comp. In the project window, highlight the first comp and drap it down into the “Create New Comp” button at the bottom of the window. Hide the proxy track on the new comp by clicking the eye next to the name of the layer. Go to Layer>Keying>Keylight 1.2. Toggle the alpha channel box, go the eye dropper in the effect window and click near the character in the comp window. The background will now be an alpha channel. In the “Final Result” drop down window go to “Screen Matte”, which will invert the colors of the comp window to black and white, like this:

 Use the White and Black Color Correct nodes to make a cleaner looking character, like above.  Render out the comp (use the second comp) with a Lossless Format set to Targa Sequence and the Channels set to RGB+Alpha. Be sure to rename the file so that the underscore is changed to a period so Maya can recognize the sequence.

MAYA

Whoo! That was a lot of AE, which will make the Maya pipeline a lot smoother! Open the newly saved scene and look the the camera (Perspective>Look Through Selected) that has been imported from AE. Import the image plane (View>Image Plane>Import Image) and make that the “Use Image Sequence” button is on.  The Tracker that we created in AE should now show up as a little cross on the image plane:

SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT

With the newly tracked timeline, we can now set up the scene! Create a ground plane, walls that will represent the doorway the character will walk through, and a “world” beyond the doors. Put each of the corresponding objects on one of three render layers: Close Up (CU), Medium (Med, or middle ground), and Back Plane (BP, or Background). You want to make that the objects match up with the image plane’s perspective and then you can render each image out. Be sure to save them as .psds so we can open them in Photoshop.

PHOTOSHOP

Now that we have done all the hard work, we can now begin matte painting! Open up the saved .psd you are ready to work on. We already made sure that the “sets” match the character and are in the same perspective, so you can now let your creative juices flow and create a really gorgeous “world” for the character to explore!

HW

Homework now is to just finish tracking the rest of the shots and continue construction of the environment in Maya that we began in class! his environment will be due a couple weeks from now

WIP of scene: http://www.mediafire.com/?tn5m1yyij4m

Until Later!