Visual Effects Filming

For the non-animated part of this unit I needed to film live-action footage for the 3d animation to be placed into. Following my storyboard I took multiple shots of footage and put them together. Here is the footage that will come before the animated part and so will set the scene.

 

Visual Effects - Research

Visual Effects and Compositing

The process of 'visual effects' is through use motion-tracking software to apply points to a piece of video footage that track the movement of the objects in the video and attempts to guess the movement of the camera in a 3D environment. This creates a theoretical path for the camera and this path can be applied to a camera in a 3D animation program. This is used when a company wishes to create CG characters and put them into a live-action scene that has a moving camera, because the movement of the live-action camera and the 3D camera are the same the CG character or object will be filmed in exactly the same way the live-action scene was and so will appear as though it is a part of the scene instead of a 3D object with a live-action video as a background.

There are various programs with which this can be accomplished such as: Blender, Voodoo, Icarus, Autodesk Matchmover, REAL VIZ Matchmover and many others. One of the programs most used in industry I assume would be Autodesk Matchmover as it comes as part of the Autodesk suite which includes Autodesk Maya, a 3D modeling and animating software.

After the footage and animation have been combined inside the chosen 3D animation software it is very helpful to be moved into a compositing program such as Autodesk Composite, which is also available as part of the Autodesk suite, in these programs the user can alter the elements of the 3D animation such as the strength of the lighting, strength of colours, size and strength of shadows, even the transparency of the 3D characters and objects. This is useful as these elements can be altered and previewed in this program instead of rendering out the animation multiple times to see how it looks if the elements are altered and makes creating the final output a lot less time consuming and a little easier.

When filming for a movie that requires CG objects or characters added a lot of things need to be concidered. The main two that come to mind are the types of shots intended to be filmed with the camera, and the lighting of the scene. These are possibly the most crucial as the camera movement and lighting need to be re-created in the 3D animation later. The lighting is not as much of a worry as long as it is re-creatable as it can be mimicked in the 3D modelling/animation software, but the camera movement could cause large problems for the motion tracking software if the camera moves to quickly or have unusual movements or angles, if the camera shot is to fast and the motion tracking software does not correctly calculate the cameras movement or position then the motion path will be wrong and the 3D animated character or object will not fit into the scene. Still/static shots are not an issue because if the camera does not move in the scene then the 3D camera does not need to move, however if the camera shot is an over-head angle looking down and moves to a low angle shot looking at the same scene but from the side, that could confuse the motion tracking software especially if the footage from the camera movement has too much blur in it.

Super Mario Animating

Learning how to animate the character sprites was tricky. I needed to find a way of having only one sprite visible at a time. So my tutor introduced me to a way of animating called 'set driven keys' which is where you create an object that 'drives' something else in the scene, in this case the transparency of the character sprites.

By creating a different set texture of textures for each character sprite I could set their transparency to be 100% or 0% based on the position on the driver, in this case the cone above the characters head. Using the 'set driven keys' window I can tell the transparency of the textures to be on or off based on the rotated position of the cone.

Visual Effects - Scenary

Using the same process I created the basic scenary of the Super Mario game; The bricks of the floor and the floating the bricks.

Super Mario Characters Progress2

Just like with the Mario sprites I have been able to create two of the common enemies from the game.

Super Mario Characters Progress

Using the sprite sheets that I found I have so far been able to create the sprites used to animate Mario. I created these sprites by creating simple 1x1 cubes, bevel the faces slighty, place them in the correct position and colour them the appropriate colour with normal lamberts. Then I combined the individual cubes into one mesh.

Super Mario Game Research

In order to create authentic mario characters I have found refference images online and will attempt to re-create them. The size of these sprite sheets is in the correct ration of single pixels. With this I can re-create the character sprites properly in the correct scale.

Visual Effects Planning

I have created a storyboard and animatic to help me plan out and explain to others what will happen in my video, I have also created a list of the types of camera shots that will be used while filming.

Visual Effects Final Choice

I have decided to do the 3D pixel Super Mario game projected into life/the air as it seems reasonably simple to do which will be helpful since I have multiple overlapping projects, given different circumstances I would have liked to create the meteorite or even a space-ship crash, but with the new software and skills I will need to learn it is best to keep the idea and the elements I'll need to create and animate simple.

Visual Effects Idea Choices

After looking at my mind-map and concidering all of the ideas on it, I have narrowed the final choice down to two.
1) Super Mario Bros game projcted into real life as a 3D pixel game.
2) A realistic meterite crash (possibly happening during filming for an alternative idea for comedic effect)

I am torn between these ideas because the Super Mario Game seems like it would be fun and the things I would need to create and animate are relatively simple. But the meteorite crash could be very interesting and teach me new skills in animation, texturing and adding effects such as fire and explosions in 3D.

Visual Effects Idea

For this unit I have made a large mind-map of ideas for what I could create which I have put into my physical work folder. At this early stage I have no idea of what I want to create yet so I wanted to get as many ideas down as I could so I would have plenty of things to choose from.