Final Project

The Final Project can be seen here:
http://www.danmorella.com/courses/cpsc815_project4.php

Synopsis:
I worked on the Jim the skeleton shot, the lighting to the Kool-Aid man shot, the splash flash intro, took part in filming the scenes, and of course in brainstorming concept(s) and ideas.

Details:
-"Jim the Skeleton"___________________________________________

Here is a link to the source material:

http://www.danmorella.com/courses/cpsc815_project4_f.php

Description:

 I hand animated "Jim" in Maya. I used a background image of the video projected on a plane to line Jim up with the chair. I also used this image plane as a reference for lighting Jim in the Maya scene. With the lighting matched up and the animation complete, I rendered out Jim (without the background plane). I took this movie into Shake, did a bit of color correction, created Jim's shadows over the background (live footage) and blured Jim a bit to blend the digital foreground into the live background.  I rendered this out in Shake. After this it was time to work on the cigarette that Jim had in his hand. Previously I had the cigarette animated in Maya, but it had no smoke and no ember on the end of the cigarette. I went back into Maya and created a plane with the rendered Shake movie that I had created. I brought in fluid effects from Maya and animated a hot glowing ember with a smoke emitter on a 2d plane (2d fluid dynamics) to match with the end of the cigarette. I rendered this out in Maya (without the background movie of course) and brought that movie back into the original Shake tree. I did a bit of post-processesing Shake work to match the digital foreground ember/smoke with background. This completed the "Jim the Skeleton" shot.

-"Kool-Aid Man Lighting"____________________________________________

Here is a link to the source material:

http://www.danmorella.com/courses/cpsc815_project4_g.php

Description:

The model and animation was created by Dan. He already had the Maya scene set up for lighting, so I can in and altered a few area planes and created a point light. One of the keys to doing this successfully is to light the background reference as close as possible to the raw movie file when it is outside of Maya. After this is done I work on lighting the Maya elements (digital foreground). If I create new lights of do lighting work, I make sure to not alter the digital background. New lights are unlinked to the background plane. Once I was able to match up the current foreground with the background image, my work was done. We rendered out the Maya scene and Dan added it to Shake for additional work.

-"Opening Splash Intro"_______________________________________________

Here is a link to the source material:

http://www.danmorella.com/courses/cpsc815_project4_a.php

Description:

I created the opening splash into with Flash and Photoshop. I idea was to create a 2d scene that displayed the joke behind "Promo/Pormo" and give the project an initial unprofessional or dimwitted feel. I think it works.

Project 3 - Tracking

I will post a link to a better quality movie soon.


The Final Movie



The Tracking Points


All of our Shake Nodes


Here is the main Shake tree


This is what was left from the jump shot.


The jump's alpha channel


Here is a shot of the Jump Sequence footage that we rotoshaped over the original footage.

The Original Footage will be posted soon.

Project 3 - Match Moving

The Final Movie


The Tracking Points


The Shake Tree


The Little Toy Man's Alpha Channel



Screen-shots of the Maya File


The Shot of the Original Footage

Project 3 - Simple Compositing

Final Movie


Tracking Points


Shake Tree


The poster image



Here is a shot of the original footage

Digital Background with a Live Foreground

Digital BG with a Live FG


The Final Composite with Shadows, etc.


Shake's Node Tree


The image of me- post-Photoshop. I tried to make my live FG image appear smoother or what I would call "plastic-y" in an attempt to match it with a smoother looking CG rendering. In Photoshop I applied a Artistic Filter to make the image of myself this way.


The image of me- before I edited it in Photoshop. The white area around me can be considered the Matte or alpha channel, since I cut the background of the image out in Photoshop (I didn't use "rotoshaping" in Shake to get my alpha channel for this image).


A shot of the interior model in Maya.


This is the background image I modeled, lit, and rendered in Maya.

Live Foreground with a Live Background

Live FG with a Live BG (Two Action Images Composite):



The Final Image


Shake's Node tree


The image alpha - notice there's a slight blur on the top.


The foreground image - Color correcting this image was probably one of the most challenging parts to this composite.



This is the background image.

CG Foreground with a Live Background

CG Foreground with a Live Background:

This is the final composite.


The resulting Node tree for my Shake file.


This is the remotes shadow that I was able to create in Shake.


This is the remotes alpha channel, which Maya made very helpful for importing into Shake.


This is the Maya scene where I aligned the remote and lite it to match the background image.


Here are some shots of the remote that I built in Maya.



This is the background image that I took to create the scene.

Smaller (monitor friendly) Web Version

Final Composite

The article is at the bottom.

Compositing Process

I used Adobe Photoshop for this project because of its efficiency with single frame timelined compositing approach. (Although, for further editing of the images, a node bases structure could be better- not as much data is lost.)
First, I had to find images with the right camera angle and lighting. After that I had to cut the primary images and project them over the background images. To manage the hierarchy I used the Layers window. 

Much of the work needed to make the image's edges match up composed of using the erase, move, blur, dodge, burn, and marquee select tools. Move tool: to position the images. Dodge tool: to lighten areas of the image. Burn tool: to darken edges of the image and apply shadows. The blur tool was very helpful to blur the edges of the images so that they wouldn't look too sharp -helping it blend in. The image to the upper left shows how I used the marquee tool to select the duck's feet and copy/duplicate them. I flipped the duplication, lowered the opacity and blurred the image to look like the ducks reflection.

One rule of thumb for me is to always do as much color correcting as I can before I convert the images into greyscale. This blends the images up nicely before we loose their color data. Before I converted the images to greyscale, I color corrected the color intensity and contrast of the images to match using the Levels and Brightness/Contrast features shown below. I then matched up the lesser quality (pixelated) images to the cleaner ones by using the film grain artistic filter.

Centaur Olympics Source Images

The runners are moving in the opposite direction, but it would have been obvious if I flipped them horizontally (vertical axis) to match the horse and runner. The runners have letters on their jerseys which would have made an image flip a dead give-away.







The image quality of the horse is low, so the quality of the other images had to be reduced to fit. Since this is for a tabloid magazine, it is not that much of a problem.













The lighting for the main runner had to be lowered. The contrast also had to be raised to give him less of a washed out look.

Source Images - Goose Story

One of the most challenging parts of this composition was finding an image of the bowling lanes that would helped place and position the goose correctly.