Here's a really cute video project that we did in the last class of a girl touching a 3D animated bunny character. In this video, the 3D animated bunny was created and animated in 3D Studio Max to match the motions of a live actor. Shadows were added to the animation to match the lighting in this video shot of the live actor.
Above is the video of the live actor composited with the bunny animation without shadows. Notice how, without shadows, the animated character seems to be floating above the ground. Adding shadows gives the viewer a visual queue to make the animation more believable to the eye.
Above is the animation that we created of just the shadows from the animated character.
Above is a solid black "matte" or "mask" of the animated character. The matte is used to mask over the shadows in the area where the bunny character is standing so that the shadows don't show through the character when all of these videos are composited together.
In the end, we loaded these 4 videos into the video editor:
1) The video of the girl actor without animation added
2) The animated video of the bunny character without shadows.
3) The video of the shadows only
4) The video of the mask only
After compositing the videos together in the video editor program, you can then save the video in whatever video format you want, like Apple iPod or quicktime format or windows "wmv" format. I usually save the videos in a format that will play on my iPhone so that I can show people what I did!
There are alot of steps to making a good video composite. But it's really not that difficult. Many of the hot-shot 3D exerts in the last few classes were between age 12 and 15! Anyway, we really had alot of fun.
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