During my catch-up with Dom tonight, we reviewed some of the shakiness still present in the track and fine-tuned some of the points used in order to prevent any jolting from the subway car.
We assumed first that it may be the points on the foreground seat disturbing the parallax, as the front is not attached to the wall and jiggles with the movement of the car, but deleting these points still did not achieve satisfactory results. After several different attempts to turn points on and off, track different spots and sim the lens, Dom suggested to me that this shot may have to rely on what’s called a nodal camera due to the software’s inability to understand the depth of the scene (possibly resulting from the very-nearly-static camera).
He explained this to me as creating all of the points on one flat plane, which the camera movement will be tracked around. A definition I found of nodal camera movement is, “The no parallax point–or nodal point–refers to the specific axis on a camera lens around which the camera rotates so as not to create a parallax error. By rotating around this point, the scenery will all move at exactly the same speed in the resulting pan shot.”
I was initially confused and skeptical of this strategy, as I had assumed that failing to accurately track depth was failing to complete my job as a matchmover, but Dom explained to me that what I would do instead is create the depth in Maya when I build the geo along the correct angles.
My next step on this project is to bring it into Maya, line it up to the ground plane, and scale it- making sure that all the flat lines of the floor line up- then I will add in my character model and send that over to Dom for the okay before I go ahead on the next step, which is to bring in animation.