First Attempt
Similarly to our last session, I found the first half easy and intuitive. I had retained my basic tracking knowledge and kept up with the face tracking with no problem. I did not run into the deviation error that I had the last time, and was in fact extremely proud of my deviation curve:
I was very excited by how this looks exactly as I believe it should look:
But, similarly to the last session, I once again ended up falling behind, failing to find a solution to my problem, and being unable to continue with the lecture. This happened with about an hour left of the lecture, which was about the same time as last week. This time, I made it up until we were to place the iron man mask object over the face, and it didn’t appear.
All I could see was this. I went back and forth making sure I was in my object group, lineup view, and that 3D models was turned on, but no luck. When I showed Dom my orientation view, he informed me that the points were somehow not actually placed on the mask.
Which made absolutely no sense to me, because they had snapped directly onto the mask when I chose “extract vertices”. All I could think was that the mask had somehow moved and left the points behind, but Dom said it was not likely.
I struggled to delete my points and redo them as fast as I can, hoping not to drop out of the lecture this time as there was undoubtedly a lot more to learn. But when I finally finished redo-ing all of my work, the same thing happened.
Why was it sideways this time? When I had loaded it into orientation view it wasn’t sideways, and when I’d had extracted the vertices it wasn’t sideways. I was completely lost, but the lecture had already moved well past this and once again I was unable to continue. I resigned myself to trying to learn it on my own time later.
Second Attempt
I had been originally convinced that the problem was that when I loaded my mask into 3DE, it appeared to load halfway between the translation arrows, like this:
But upon re-watching Dom’s video, I can see that his also does this.
This rules out my original theory as to what the problem could be. I watched the process of placing vertexes on the helmet again, copying Dom’s actions second by second, and thought I figured it out-
Maybe I hadn’t clicked out of point group the first time! I got my hopes up, but, crushingly, the same exact thing happened a third time.
Staring at this, though, I can see that the points clearly are on the mask. It just isn’t snapping to the face for whatever reason. I decided to try again one more time. Something I noticed is that in lineup view, the depth of my points appear to be incorrect. I noticed that when I finish tracking the face and calculating but before I add in the iron man helmet, my lineup view looks like this (pretty good):
However, when I add in the helmet and then calculate, my lineup view changes like this:
I don’t understand why my points appear to have changed depth after I applied them to the mask vertices. I try, painfully, once again, and this happens:
All I can possibly hope for at this point is just starting the entire project over.
Starting Over: Day One
One and a Half Hours into Starting Over
For the first day I plan to work until I get to the point where I correct that mistake, and then tomorrow I will work on the section of the lecture that I had missed. I’ve now been following Dom’s actions as closely as possible for an hour and a half and gotten to the end of us tracking the background, as well as putting in our lens and camera information and informing 3DE4 that our camera is fixed. I’m starting to suspect that the reason I was running into my error is because maybe the camera should be marked as fixed for the face too, but we’ll find out. Regardless, this practice is helping me retain a lot of the information that, the first time I did it, was merely me following along and taking Dom’s words at face value; I now feel I’ve gained a higher understanding.
Also, this time, I was overjoyed to immediately see a flat plane in my parameter adjustment window the first time I tried, as I had struggled with it during our first tutorial. I’ve uploaded my success this time vs my struggle last time, in that order, below:
I completed the three checks Dom mentioned- parameter adjustment, orientation, and lineup, and my work looked correct so far. I’m not sure if I made it to this point correctly the first time, but if I did, I didn’t understand it as I do now. [Addendum before moving ahead: I now realize that my theory as to the cause of the issue cannot be the camera not being fixed as the same camera settings actually serve both/all point groups. That, and the camera group creates a threshold for the camera whereas the object group does not interact with the camera controls at all].
Two and a Half Hours into Starting Over
Voìla. I nearly cried of happiness.
However, upon playback, I discovered I wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
I’ve now resolved my problem of trying to figure out how to make the mask snap on to the face. I am going to allow myself to work on getting that mask looking good, as well as finishing up the tutorial, next time.
Day Two
I reached out for some help, and Luca suggested that I add some more points, which was one of my theories- that there is not enough data during the beginning of the nose-pick for the mask to accurately track. Sure enough, I added just 3 points and it’s already looking better. Instead of the mask ballooning off the face into the atmosphere, it now only jumps a little bit. I will continue to fine tune this until it’s acceptable.
Something that I discovered as I worked was that I did not have to extract every single new point as a vertex on the mask in order to fix the problem. This makes sense, because Dom mentioned that the sum of the object points calculate the general motion of the object, therefore the extra points help the other applied vertices know what to do.
Yay, it’s projected and fitted! I’m ready to move on to the next part! I’m now about to move on to the last hour of the session, which I had not attempted previously.
Three Hours Later
The exporting process gripped my heart in fear with an icy fist. Imagine my joy when I imported my mel script and was greeted with this:
Absolutely beautiful. Breathing as if I’ve run a marathon.
I then spent about two hours just getting the helmet to open, due to technical difficulties (VMware, Maya being slow, moving pivot points, etc) but I made it:
….and then, just because I wanted to, I did this.
….and I also constrained the eyes to the movement of the frontplate because I thought it looked better,
The render went smoothly, other than me briefly forgetting that a skydome must have camera visibility set to zero, and wondering why I couldn’t light both my mask and my image plane at the same time.
But I turned my brain back on and got everything set up. Time to move on to Nuke! On my own projects, I’ve been using Adobe Media Encoder, but it’s about time I learn to use professional grade software.
Well, here it is!! There are still some things I could fix (like making sure the mouth can be seen inside), but I’m still incredibly proud I made it this far. I overcame a lot of issues to get to this point and it’s time to let this be my first finished version of the project. Also, my brain feels exhausted, to the point where I’m not proofreading this, but I will maybe publish an update with some fine tuning. That’s all for now!