Month: April 2021

For the week going into our external collaboration unit, we (the matchmove team) were tasked with tracking a few videos of roads as we wait for the actual driving footage to become available to us. The sample videos we were given included a few that looked pretty easy, featuring a mostly stable camera and lots of debris around the roadside. One does include a bridge which the camera passes under, which will require some splining, and another features dust spinning from dunes around the highway, which may also interfere with a solid track and require some creative point placement. The only one that may present a problem is the video that involves leaves flying past the cameras in the wind. This one will for sure be the most challenging footage to track. As of yet, I’ve worked on the shot above, and found it quite simple. Early on in my attempt, I managed a 0.8 deviation curve before even refining any of my points.

I’m eager to see what our footage will look like for the film when it is available to us. It could be an easy overhead shot like this one, or it may be quite dynamic, with several moving parts, which will be difficult but present me the opportunity to practice as well as exhibit my skills on my showreel.

It escapes my memory as to whether I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but I’ve decided to focus my specialism in motion tracking. I’ve found that I’m good at it, it’s interesting and fun, and I’m eager to put my best foot forward in the job market as I enter the industry this year. So, while I visited my family in the United States over Easter break, I worked on a project with Dom to refine my matchmove skills and build a solid piece for my showreel.

We chose this shot because it is slightly more challenging, as the camera rotates around the scene, and because it shows a good contrast in depth. As I worked on it, Dom helped me work on some methods to fine-tune my deviation curve, like timeline weight blending and splining. Another big takeaway from this project for me was a better understanding of how to build geo around a tracked scene in Maya. I still need to practice all of the above a few more times, though, in order to really get the process down.

The stage of my process on this practice project so far is placing wireframe cones around the scene to show depth, and my next step will be to add in an animated object- potentially, I’m thinking, a helicopter- in the scene, emerging from the back and landing up at the front, in order to show off the track to the best of my abilities.