Nodal Pans And Camera Rotations This chapter will take you through most of the user interface while teaching the basics of nodal pan camera tracking. You will decipher between varying horizon lines and review proper point contrast locations for the best possible solution. Learn to manually remove tracking features on trees and shadows that have motion.- Keywords: pftrack, pftrack training, pfhoe
Extreme Camera Angles When shooting objects from unmeasurable angle, often creates difficulty in extracting a proper base for your 3d scenes and match moves. Examples of this situation are best viewed on signs and detail on the side or facade of a building. Learn how to get these distances by properly placing scene orientation.
Image Based Modeling PFTrack is a robust image application that also allows you to extract 3d meshes and textures from shot footage objects. We bring in a sequence, track it, and then build a 3d mesh so we can extract it and send the whole scene to an animation application. This workflow is best designed for film previz. Testing Cameras and Geometry The end of this project concludes with setting up a rigid body dynamics solver to test the 3d geometry data extracted from PFTrack’s camera solution. learn how to view and manipulate all assets imported into Maya of your favorite animation package. Masking Techniques A common error amongst matchmovers would be tracking bad data or reflections. Reflections can cause points to move in a unorthodox behavior causing the final solution to slide around with out accurate results. We will take you through the art of rotoscoping with PFTracks masking tool.
Creating Non-Existant Ground Plane The footage from this project has great overhead detail, but lacks the proper contrast to track the traditional ground plane. Learn how to track areas of detail and leave place holders for your 3d animation package. In this screenshot you see the addition of ground geometry place based on markers tracked in PFTrack.
Z-Channel Extraction After tracking a complete project from start to finish, learn how to analyze zChannel information based on the PFtrack camera solution. As long as your camera was shot in free motion, you can extract a grayscale depth map. PFTrack allows you to see this depth map as both an image and a wireframe.
Optical Flow Another powerful image analysis tool is optical flow technology. Pull a RGB image sequence with the motion vector data directly within the PFTrack UI. Learn the basics of optical flow alterations to suite more complex image sequence needs.
Complex Masks It wouldn’t be a true cmiVFX training video unless we took that extra little step. This chapter will teach you all about 2D user features and how to use them in common VFX compositing applications. This project was based on the recent popular HP commercials featuring celebrity hand movements interacting with virtual objects. Homepage
