Just recently I rediscovered Maya’s own matchmoving capability. Last time I tried it was back in 2001 and its lack of automatic tracking was the reason I left it alone. But what if I had a low enough number of good markers, could it be done in Maya? Yes! I was really surprised to be able to track this clip in less than 10 minutes and with good result.

Anyhow, I imagine that a Kangosaur guarding your keyboard should keep most intruders at bay

angry_kango

Animation is done and I’m moving onto integrating the CG animals with the video sequence. At the moment I’ve ditched the idea that these creatures will have fur because it will require allot of extra work to make it blend in well with the rest of the CG elements.

kangos_1st_pass

This is another matchmoving exercise I’ve put together in my spare time. Tried a new process in order to get a steady solve and by the looks of it I like this new method allot better. Next step will be to add fur to the creature because of the snowy environment. And after that two baby kangosaur’s playing around in the snow.

winter_kangos_animation_previs

While visting my folks during the recent holidays I decided to make some sort of small matchmoving excercise. Using my SD camcorder I’ve had quite some problems to get a descent solve when tracking the camera movement, so using a HD camera would clrear out a few problems. Atleast I though it would.

I wanted to lay down some “digital” destruction to a field of oil cisterns in my home towns harbour . So I shot a sequence just rotating on a spot mimicing a tripod. I Also added some zoom to get interesting dynamics to the shot. Later when I tried solving the shot using a automatic solving I got some really crazy result with markers flying all over the screen and even strange depth displacement due to the zooming. So I had to admit that even with a HD camera automatic tracking isn’t the way to go. I started placing manual trackers, really making sure that I use the same tracker if a reference kept reappearing on screen.

And that did the trick, enjoy.

Cistern tracked camera

After being forced to reconsider my scene setup I’ve scraped the original idea. I browsed youtube for a reference, something I should have done a long time ago. My new idea is to create something more subtle and a little less advanced. The flow of the avalanche has been animated to mimic the friction from the underlying surface. I’ve ditched the idea to have 3D rendered shadows, they are now animated masks in After Effects. The reason for this is that the 3D rendered version contained gaps in the shadowed area. Gaps that I couldn’t solve.

Anyway, enjoy Avalanche render