Post progress

I have been working on this quite a bit over the last week. First, I looked at the animatic to figure out the timing of the actual shooting of the bins to allow for the animation that would take place. I drew this scene plan that helped when it came to filming - a birds eye view of the scene showing camera movement with the timing:



Then on a nice sunny morning, we got down to the bins for filming. There were a few minor issues - cloud cover that kept changing the lighting - we needed just one consistent lighting to keep things simple. Also people who kept coming along to put bottles in the bins. It was all good in the end, we had a few windows of opportunity that we jumped on and got several takes done. Ryan counted out seconds whilst I filmed the bins. Here is our chosen video that we are going to use:



Not bad but very wobbly as it was all hand held. As we're aiming to layer on both 2D and 3D animation I thought it would be best for the footage to be as smooth as possible to allow for a nice subtle coming-to-life transition of these bins. So I've spent a fun week tracking using Composite...

This was all fairly new to me so there was a learning curve involved and much of the work seemed to be setting up the folders properly to allow for a consistent workflow. In a nutshell it involved going through the footage 50 frames at a time in Composite, adding 2 tracking points using a tracker node, then using a 2D transform node to connect to the trackers and stabilize the footage. I also added another layer in the 2D transform node in order to animate the scale and positioning of the footage (to stop it going out of frame.) Then rendering it out and repeating the process. Though it has been a lengthy and slightly tedious process it has resulted in a smooth camera move and the footage is much nicer to watch:



The sudden acceleration is a bit weird at the end, but hey.. maybe we can make it work nicely with the bin doing a gradual lift off then a star wars like time warp into the distance!

Today, I used Matchmover to track the footage and translate it into a Maya scene. Looking forward to the moment of putting in Ryans 3D bin into the footage, things are getting exciting :)

14/3/2011 - Update

I have worked on a lot more stuff since the last posts above. These images show what my animated textures will look like on the bins.





Today has been fun because we have finally put together the CG bins with the footage into Maya.



Can you guess which one is real and which one is CG?...probably - but pretty good I think considering we havn't played around with the lighting and rendering. Still I'm quite happy with it. Ryan worked on the model and texturing - nice job mate! :-)