Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
World Info & Rotoscoping / Rotoscoping & Matchmoving pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / World Info & Rotoscoping / Rotoscoping & Matchmoving pt. 1)
A common task for 3D animation is to incorporate your animation into pre-existing footage. Electric Image calls this Rotoscoping. The Rotoscoping Tools exist inside the Camera Object. Let's double click on that and inside the Camera Window we see a tab that says Rotocomp. There's two lists. Anything in the Background List will play behind your animation. And anything in the Foreground List will play on top of your animation. If you have foreground footage, it must have an alpha channel; otherwise it will completely cover your 3D. So if you had both background and foreground, then your animation would be sandwiched in between. We'll focus on background footage for this lesson and let's go ahead and add something to this list. So there's our footage. Let's take a look at it in the Info Box. There's the size and the number of frames and we've seen these controls before about what to do. We just want to animate to the length of this background. So I'll make sure that my animation duration is only 70 frames. I do that by opening up the Render Settings and then timing, I'll change the total frames to 70. And we'll talk more about Render Settings in a lesson very soon. I also want to make sure my Render Settings match the size of the background footage so again, that's 720 by 540 and into Resolution, 720 by 540. OK, now I'm ready to see what the footage looks like in the Camera Window and I'll click on the Roto Icon and it shows my footage. I'll select that and instantly that background footage is loaded into the Camera Window. Also notice that I have a frame counter here and a slider which allows me to navigate through my footage so that I can see any frame within that 70-frame clip. So I have a little tilt and pan shot here. Let's take a look at our scene a little more closely. In the Project Window we see that have several cone objects and a cube. The cube is a ground plane that's receiving shadows cast by the cones and is generating a shadow mask so only the shadows will render. And there's a side view of all the cones laid out along the Z axis. Let's do a quick render and we see the cones comped in our scene casting shadows on the dirt. Pretty neat. Now, let's jump back to the Camera Window. The reason that we see the cones casting shadows on to the background is because this little checkbox here; Render Rotoscope Composite. Without that checked on, then you would only see the objects in your scene render but not the background. So we want to have the background in our scene rendered with the animation. So we're going to keep that checked on. Let's go ahead and preview what we have so far and in order to see the preview with the moving background, let's Control Click on the Preview Button and where it says Background, it's set to None. Let's change that to Animated. And then we'll just click the Preview Button. Let's change one more thing; Detail Phong Shaded. Let's change that to Wireframe and preview again and now we can see the rest of the plate behind our 3D graphics. Well, we want more than just to have our 3D objects floating over the scene; we want to integrate them into the scene so that they look like they're sitting on the floor of this rocky valley. So in order to do that, we have to match our virtual camera to what the actual camera that videotaped this shot did. And that's called Matchmoving. Matchmoving is also controlled by the camera and if we scoot over to the Matchmove Tab, we get its controls. First of all, we have to enable the Matchmove and that tells Animator to send data from the Matchmove to the camera so that our virtual camera will imitate the move of the video camera in this shot. The other thing we need to do is make sure that the camera's animatable and we know it's animatable because it has this green triangle turned On. OK. We need to tell Matchmove what background we want to use as our source for tracking. So let's click on the Master Button and click Add and again we'll pick the back one that we're using for the Roto. How the Matchmoving process works in Animator is that you have to define what areas of interest within your shot that you want the program to track. These little areas of interest are called Targets and that's why there's this Targets Tab here. So click on that and then we'll add our first target. Now that we have a target, we can go to the Target Editor and we'll get a big, new window showing our shot and up here in the left-hand corner is our first target, Target Number 0. The first targets you set up should probably be over features within your scene that remain within the shot for the duration of your shot. So right now I see this little rock sticking up here and because it's nicely contrasted with the background; that would make a really good target and it stays within the shot for the duration of the shot. What we'll do is grab the very middle of our Target Number 0 and drag it to where it appears over that feature. Now, let me show you something else. Hold down the Option Key and drag again and you get a magnified view of your shot. That's a little easier to position this way.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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