My Specialism

For this unit i am going to specialise in visual effects from filming to camera tracking all the way down to composting it all together to make the final piece. I am very interested in this side of filming making and would love to make a career out of it and have been wanting to do this since i first saw Star Wars back in the day. I have done camera tracking before back in college but it didn't go very well and found it quite hard to do. I then had another go at it last year in year 2 of my animation course and did a lot of research in to it and managed to create a really great piece of work. I hope now i have a really good understanding of the process and software to use i can create a really nice connivence piece of visual effects.

The Process

The beginning stages of creating visual effects all starts with good setup, what i mean by this is before shooting the shot with a camera you have to get a really good collection of reference. The first this is to take picture of the light source and where its coming from and all so take pictures of the set. This will help you to recreate the light in 3d later on and be able to see how to match the shadows with CG elements and live action elements. The next step would to be get HDR panoramic pictures of the set, the best way to do this is to use a chrome ball what will allow you to capture a wide angle shot of the scene. You can also use a grey ball what will allow you to the how the shadows are being casted and how long they are and if there dark or light.

HDRI

HDRI is a process where you take pictures of the same view or scene with different exposer settings and then added together inside an image processing software like photoshop or photomatix. This process is used a lot in 3d now days because it recreates the same lighting as what you shot with your camera. They are now starting to use it a lot more in games because it give a much more realistic look and can be done because how technology is progressing so fast.

This is a HDRI picture of a city, you can see that there is more dynamic range. This is achieved by setting the exposers to different settings then putting them together in photoshop ect.

This is a panoramic HDRI picture this is what you when creating HDRI lighting inside a 3d software like Autodesk Maya.

These pictures below are some of my own tests of HDR pictures which i created with my canon 600d and photoshop.

This is my first ever HDRI i have created and feel that i can do a lot better by missing around with the settings in photoshops HDRI created. To get this type of image i set my camera to take 3 photos at different exposure settings. The i imported them into photoshop merge to HDR Pro, what is adobes own HDRI software built inside photoshop. Once photoshop has combined the images together you can play around with the settings like shadow, detail, highlights and many more.

This picture is a quick HDRI panoramic i have done inside photoshop, this is the type of this you need to do for visual effects. The other way is to get a chrome sphere and take three shots with different exposures, this way is a lot easier to create HDRI panoramic than the way i did. it.

Here are some screenshots of the process i did to create HDR images inside photshop. There are special HDR softwares out there but i find photoshop to do a pretty good job.

This screenshot shows you how to bring pictures into photoshop and merge them together to make a HDR image.

This window shows you how to search or the image files you want to merge together. You can selected as many as you want and it will to the rest of the work for you.

Here i am just searching for my own images i would like to merge together.

Once you have selected all of your images the next step is to press ok and let photoshop work its magic.

Once photoshop has finished processing this window will come up and it will have different parameters you can mess around with to get the look you are looking for. Once you have finished the next step is to press ok and it will turn what you have created into one image file.

Camera Tracking

Camera Tracking is a process in visual effects which allows you to match the movement of the recorded camera and recreate it in 3d.This allows you to add CG elements and make them look like they are integrated in the video.

The software i have been learning to use is called PFtrack by the pixel farm. This is the software i used last year when we had to integrate 3d with live action.

Here are some screenshots of the step by step process to a basic camera track.

In this screenshot you can see three different windows, one is the file browser on the right. The middle is where you import all your videos files into and the far left it your work space area. This is where you add different nodes like auto track, camera solve and so on.

This window shows you all the different nodes you can choose from like auto track and camera solve. All you have to do is click one of them and it will link its self to the video file in the workspace area.

This is where you mess around with different parameters inside the node, this one is auto track. I can go in and change how many tracking features i want and do i want better speed or accuracy.

This window is just an enlarged view of the setting on that node.

Once i have tracked i then insert and camera solve what will go in a use the data from the tracking features and recreate a camera that matchs how i video in the real world.

This is enlarged view of the parameters.

The next step is to go in and orient the scene this is very simple in pftrack and there are many different ways to do it.

This shows you the different features of the node

This window shows you how to orient the scene you can do it by using translate, rotate and scale. All you do it click the edit mode and change to a different tool. You can all so click and a point and make it the origin which is a must to orientate the scene and get better results.

The next and final thing to do is to export to a 3d software or composting software of your choice. Just go in a create a export node and export the right format.