Category: Advanced Unit Collab Project

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Individual Project: Rig Errors & Data Loss

I intended to spend my time today working on scaling my character rig into my tracked scene, but unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, spent most of my work day navigating horrifying errors that threatened to erase the work I’d done on this project throughout the term.

Ready to scale my rig, I downloaded all of the necessary (and expensive) files from turbosquid and moved them into the appropriate folders, then dragged the character into my Maya scene.

Immediately upon doing so, I was met with this notification:

I believed this to be due to the fact that the rig utilizes the shave and a haircut plugin and I was attempting to launch Maya 2018 without launching the plugin first. I decided to go ahead with scaling, planning to only open shave and a haircut when I was ready to render out my scene. I applied texture to the rig, then hit the keyboard shortcut cmd + s to save my file. Immediately upon doing so, Maya crashed.

When I went to re-open my scene, I found the file corrupted.

I tried deleting the character rig and all assets related to it, but unfortunately, I found that my scene was still ruined. The geo was completely corrupted; when I tried to look through the camera lens I could only see this.

It appeared that almost all of the assets in my scene had changed and would require reworking. However, I did find this new file in my scenes folder, which, according to Luke, was a temporary file saved by the software in the event of a crash.

Dragging it into Maya, I found that my scene opened perfectly, and decided to call off my heart attack.

For a little while, though, I was confused as to why I could not save this file as a regular Maya file, and was nervous that I had perhaps lost all of my work from the term after all.

Thankfully, I found a simple answer: it was an error with my naming convention. Maya believed I was trying to save the file as a “.01” file, solved when I switched to “v1” and “v2”.

I’d grown used to using “.01” in my 3DE work.

I’ve tried a couple of times, now, to save the scene (incrementally) with the character rig in it, and am met with a crash each time. My leading theory is that it has to do with the shave and a haircut data; I need to open the program with the shave and a haircut plugin installed in order to avoid data loss. Tomorrow morning I will review my one-to-one with Luke in which we discussed using the plugin and give it another try.

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Individual Project: Tutoring Help and Image Plane Error Solutions

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d lost a lot of time on my individual project due to technical difficulties with the image plane, unsolvable in the hypershade, the attribute editor, or even by recreating the dewarped footage.

After running through a couple of options today, we found the solution: the EXR files were simply to large to run compatibly in Maya on the image plane. I put the EXR files through Media Encoder, converted them to JPEGs, and found that they ran perfectly.

So now that I’ve finally got a working scene, I can return to the task from last week and build geo for it, aligning it as tightly as I can with the shot in order to make up for the unfortunate use of the nodal camera necessary for this track. Once I’ve got my geo built and my character rig in and scaled, I will review the scene with Dom to make sure it is ready for animation. Thankfully, I’ve got a second session with Dom scheduled for this week on Friday, so I’ll be able to move along with my progress at a faster rate and make up for some of the time lost on this issue.

Below I am including a list from my handwritten notes on how to snap a 3DE scene to the ground plane in Maya, because I continually forget and end up writing and researching it repeatedly. I attempted to break down the steps more thoroughly in my notes this time.

3DE Scene Snap to Ground Plane in Maya Process:

  1. Select scene, then hit W, followed by D, to bring up the pivot point
  2. Middle mouse drag the pivot to a point in the scene while holding V to snap.
  3. Hit D again, and, holding X, snap the scene to the center of the world.
  4. Turn on frustrum display controls, allowing you to see the camera’s angle in the world.
  5. Add another 0 to the image plane depth, allowing geo to move through it.

Now, when you load a character or object into the scene, they will automatically spawn in the image plane, and once the scene is scaled and sized correctly, blend seamlessly.

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Indie Film Collab Project: Tutoring Help, Motion Blur Tracking Workarounds

Speaking with Dom about the motion blur issue in our indie film project footage was a godsend. While I originally wasn’t able to track any single point for longer than about ten frames, and even then wasn’t able to keep a very solid track on them, I’ve now got four well tracked points in the midground and plan to continue placing more into tonight in order to catch up on lost time this past week.

Though I’d made it to point 74 in my original attempt to track this blurry shot, I deleted all of my previous subpar work and started again with Dom, in order to avoid my messy track interfering with the calculation of the shot. The first thing we did was open the image controls window and up the contrast and brightness to their respective maximums. Then we began searching for very dramatic patterns, looking to place points at the very corner of a high contrast area. As I tracked a high-contrast point, Dom helped me with a couple of tactics for blurry footage.

When tracking a blurry shot, it’s always necessary to use a very wide search box and to constantly adjust the pattern. For a shot as blurry as this one, we tracked every single frame by hand, which is, although time-consuming, necessary. Fortunately, Dom did tell me that after six or so points tracked accurately, the software will be able to account for the blur in calculation.

As I tracked every point by hand, I found that for each point I had to hand-select the area where it should be placed at least once or twice, with the software simply unable to account for the massive blur at times, and meticulously pinpoint its exact location using page-up and page-down, though Dom did tell me to make sure not to do this too frequently in order to avoid vibration of each point.

Though using a wide search area with high contrast is imperative for a blurry shot, it’s also important to make sure that the search box never crosses into the depth of another object in the shot. I found it somewhat difficult to discern whether my point had moved during some of the camera shaking, and though I only have four points, I spent almost half an hour placing them.

This shot may be strenuous, but getting these points tracked is a glimmer of hope that all is not lost and it won’t be impossible. It is fortunate that we know the camera specs, and, as Dom pointed out, this will be a showstopper of a showreel shot.

Camera specs- we researched the filmback width and height for a Canon EFS 15_85mm. I was initially frustrated with the fact that I cannot have the width be fixed at 36 mm, the height be fixed at 24 mm, and the pixel aspect be fixed at 1 all at the same time without one automatically turning to passive, but Dom has instructed me that it is fine for the software to edit; as long as the pixel aspect stays fixed at one.
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Collab Project: Tracking Difficulty due to Camera Shaking/Blurriness

Similarly to my individual project, I struggled this week to make real progress on the collaborative project; hitting a wall with the software’s as well as my own capabilities. The shots include frequent camera movement, and unfortunately, this results in near-constant motion blur. Because of this I’m only able to track around 10 frames at a time per point. I am hoping to bring this up with Dom tonight for some potential workarounds; I expect we will discuss advanced techniques for splining. I’ve spent several days trying to work this out myself with no luck, and am worried about the project deadline.

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Dynamic Track Polish & Breakdown for Framestore Launchpad Competition

On the twelfth of May, Antoni from the VFX program asked me if I’d like to join him and some of his fellow VFX classmates in a competition that Framestore is running this summer. Essentially, teams of six students create a combined showreel to submit this coming Friday (the fourteenth of May) showcasing the talents of each member of the group as well as our ability to collaborate on a project. The selected teams will be given the opportunity to make a 30-second short film over the summer with mentorship and free online aid from Framestore representatives. It will be treated like a Framestore internship, and thus is tremendously beneficial for breaking into the industry, not to mention the likelihood of placing a role at Framestore itself afterward- according to Schlussel’s presentation earlier this week, about 70% of Framestore interns end up working there afterward.

So within two days, we are working to put together a showreel that displays our individual best work as well as some of our collaborative projects. Me, Antoni, and Gherardo, who are all part of this group, worked on a collaborative project last term, and we are excited to showcase that in this reel, and the other three members- Diana, Giulia, and Jane- also worked together on a collaborative project last term, so we have a great opportunity to show off our ability to create fantastic work as a team.

I’ve volunteered to write the cover letter for the group. In addition to that, of course, I’ve also got to make sure that my individual work is good enough to not only represent me well but benefit the rest of my group members as we present our work. I had a session with Dom this morning to discuss three things- the mocap footage I’ve been collecting and which I should choose for my individual matchimation project (see post regarding that), fixing image plane bugs in Maya, and which of my matchmove work exhibits my skill best.

Dom suggested I use my helicopter shot, or, as we’ve been referring to it, the Dynamic Shot (because the rotating camera is challenging + impressive for a background track), however, he had a few suggestions for ways that I might push the shot to a more competitive final product. For reference, this is what it looked like originally:

Dom pointed out that the flying helicopter actually does not showcase my track well, because we can’t see the camera moving around it, and the rotating camera is the entire point of choosing such difficult footage to track. He suggested that I have the helicopter stationary in the foreground and instead have a couple extra helicopters flying around it in the back. He also mentioned that I should add a shadowmatte to the ground plane to give it extra believability. Here is the shot with these changes:

It looks a lot better! Finally this shot is showreel-ready. For the Framestore competition specifically, we are looking to add a reel breakdown with all of our passes, and so below you’ll find my breakdown for this shot including my playblast, geo wireframe, and final polish.

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Indie Film Tracking Week 1

This week, I began work on tracking the shots that I, Antoni, and Marianna were given to practice as we wait for the footage. I was able to get a really decent track on the forest road shot, with a 0.7 deviation, and in lineup view the depth of my points is exactly what I intended. However, when I exported my project into Maya, I was unable to figure out why my image plane was not moving along with the camera. I’ve booked a session with Dom to try to discuss this further when next he’s free. Fortunately, Antoni was able to get the shot done in time for our Friday deadline.

I also attempted to track the bridge shot, but the quality of the footage is rather low. I’m keeping that in mind as I continue with my personal tracking project.

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Road Tracking Practice

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.

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Easter Break: Matchmove Practice

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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.