COMPOSITING TUTORIAL

TUTORIAL - HOW TO COMPOSITE IN 3D

Here's a nice tutorial (PDF) that I wrote this week on compositing 3D objects into a photograph using 3D Studio Max.  We'll go through this in the next class.  Here's a picture of the composited photograph.

Download my PDF tutorial here.

Download the project files here.

THE GOODYEAR BLIMP BUZZED MY HOUSE!

OK, not really :-)   This is just a fun video project that I was trying to finish for our class this week.  I'll show it to you in class.  I'm still working on it, but so far it looks very cool.  In the video, I'm doing an interview with someone standing just outside of my home, when suddenly there's a roaring sound of aircraft propellers overhead as the Goodyear Blimp does a dangerous low altitude flyover.  The Blimp is modeled in 3D Studio Max.  I used some reflective materials on the blimp and used a reflection bitmap of house roof-tops reflecting on the blimp.  I used motion blur, fog & smoke effects.  And, the composite of the blimp is through a lot of tree limbs to add to the realism.  Here's a photo of the blimp without the composite.  (Credit:  The blimp 3D model is a free download that I got from somewhere.  I'd love to give the author the credit for his model, but I can't remember where I got it.)

Our "games" class starts in 2 weeks.  But, if you have an interest in video compositing, we can spend another class session on how to do this Blimp fly-over video compositing project.

Matchmoving Animation

In our class on Thursday, March 25 2010, we did a camera matching and compositing project with a photograph and 3D objects, lighting and shadows that you created in 3D Studio Max.  I posted a couple of your pictures below.

And, here is the matchmove video  project that I demonstrated in class.  Next week we will do a very cool, very original matchmove project!  Don't miss it!

Click here to view this movie un-cropped (640x480).

Click here to view this movie in 640x480 format.

  
Video Compositing is a technique for blending computer generated video with real video from a camera.
  

Camera Matching is a technique for matching the viewing angle and viewing distance to your computer generated (CG) animation to the view in a photograph or video so that, when you composite your animation object and shadows to the photo or movie, all the angles of the objects and shadows look just right. Camera matching is importantif you want to make your picture-compost or video-composite look convincing.  In class we just matched up our CG objects and shadows to the picture by looking at it.  But, the 3D Studio Max software has built in tools for doing that.
  
Matchingmoving is a computer technique for looking at a video clip from a video camera and figuring out the camera's viewing angle and its distance to the subject and for tracking the camera's motion and shake during the video clip.  All that camera motion tracking information is then fed into your CG animation so the viewing motion and shake of your animation matches up perfectly with the live video.  In class next week we will use a free matchmoving software program to do a very cool project.

  

Here are the steps that I used to make the matchmove video shown above:

• I started out by making a short 10 second video of a rug in my living room using a home movie camera. 
• Using 3D Studio Max, I created a biped skeleton animation and manually matched the lighting in my biped animation to the lighting in my video clip.  
• Next, I rigged the Kim Possible character to the biped skeleton.  
• Then I used a freeware program called "Voodoo Camera Tracker" to calculate the camera motion-tracking information from my video clip.  I downloaded the motion tracking data into 3D Studio Max and rendered out the animation video with shadows to a video file with a black background. 
• Then, I used a video editor to composite the animation video onto the original live video to get the  final video  of the computer generated character dancing on the carpet.

In next week's class, I'll walk you through all these steps so that you can do this on your own.

In our class on Thursday, we did a project to introduce you to camera matching and compositing.  We used the "Matte/Shadow/Reflection" metal ray material in 3D Studio Max to allow your 3D objects to cast shadows onto a transparent plane.  And then we oriented the camera view of your 3D object to roughly match that of your photo.  Here are a couple of your rendered composite images.

  

  

Tree Modeling

Here are some renders of tree 3D models that we created in class on May 21, 2009.   The tree models were made using a free open-source program called "Arbaro" (http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/).  The pictures were rendered using 3D Studio Max and mental ray.

Playing with Caustic Lighting

Here are a few images that were created by students in class on April 2, 2009.  In this class students practiced making "caustic lighting" effects using 3D Studio Max and the mental ray renderer.  In these images, students used HDRI reflection maps, created various types of transparent and reflective materials, used lathe modeling and used the noise modifier to make some interesting caustic light effects.  This was a fun class! Great work everybody!

Creating and Using HDRI Reflection Maps

Here's the HDRI reflection example we created in class on April 2, 2009. That's my lovely granddaughter in the middle!