Similar to most of my 3DEqualizer sessions, I was able to follow closely on the 8th during the first half of the day, but fell off the wagon in the second half. That being said, I made it much farther than I have before using 3DE and attribute my higher competency to my one on one sessions with Dom. I believe that I have a greater understanding not only of how tracking works, but of the software in general. These sessions have also allowed me to understand more about paths in Maya and how projects are set as well as control parenting in the Outliner.
I made it to our first check-in happy with my calculation curve, but with a high deviation:
Dom informed me that I must include some of the points in the background in order for the track to understand that area. I had originally hid the points that I attempted to track in this area, because they weren’t tracking well due to the motion blur and were throwing off my deviation. But I copied the points that he put down and came up with a much better number:
After this we began adding points along the road. I couldn’t understand why, but each time I placed a point on the road, my “calc from scratch” window showed me an alarming zig-zagging line clearly confused by my attemps. So I worked through the lunch break, and discovered that some points along the left side of the road were enough to even it out, as long as I placed enough down. I also found a couple small spots on the right side that tracked well. After tracking the road, we returned from lunch and adjusted parameters:
I was relieved to find that so far my background track was going perfectly. This was genuinely a big difference from every other full class session I had done in 3DE I had done in the past.
When I placed the obj file, I was a little nervous that I’d encounter the iron man helmet problem, but it went without a hitch:
I was a little concerned that the suit seemed to be a little too big for the man, though, as I tried to line the shoulder points up, until Dom informed me that it was ok if some were along the arms as we would be deleting the image plane and animating the arms anyway.
I was unable to keep following when we encountered an issue with moving the rig’s geo and its skeleton at the same time. Dom explained his fix with the locators a couple times, but I found myself hopelessly lost. And so, later on, I will take a look into those files with the locator, study them, and animate the rig myself.