Week 6 - Match-moving Data in Maya

 

Fig.1 - Final Render - Live video

This week I sat down and watched the lecture whilst taking notes because I could not keep up as there were so many conventions to learn from. Instead, I decided to take a screenshot from the live lecture and present all my notes here. 

For starters (shown in figure 2) camera tracking and the scene were already attached in Nuke. The card was then added/ scaled after being connected to the scene node. The card was then previewed in 3-dimensional space to be placed perfectly aligned to the floor. A coloured checkboard was then added to the nodes to be visible in the 2D scene and made to fit the ground plane. A point cloud generator was then used to connect to the camera and an unnamed arrow to the viewer. Double-clicking will then direct you to analyze the sequence, and then follows track points. Afterwards camera tracking data was exported to Maya. This was done by adding the 'writegeo' node to the scene node, then following node properties and saving as (matchmove_data.fbx). An axis was then created to help locate the distance and ground plane in Maya. When going to the write geo node, under compatibility, everything was ticked except lights before executing.

Afterwards, the FBX file saved in the nuke folder was dragged into Maya where we were able to see the scene and all the locators pinpointing the space/ area. An Asset from FBX was then imported into the scene and placed on the plane. Another plane was created and assigned a new material called a shadow-matte. However, the scene needed lighting to be seen in the render view. To do this, photoshop was used and HDR lighting images were all opened. To merge them together, locate; file - automate - merge in HDR Pro - open file - and merge by clicking ok. The wand was used to select the skyline and make it bright by using the attribute editor. The image then got exported as an EXR format which was then placed in a skydome in Maya. 

Moving back to Maya, the skydome was scaled to get all the scenes placed inside. The camera attribute settings were used to focus well on the scene, by adjusting the near clip plane by adding two more 0 before the decimal. Going back to the skydome, the visibility was turned off. Thus ending this nicely with a final render as shown in figure 1. After rendering you were able to see the lighting by clicking the A icon to view the different channels. However, to fix the noise in the render view; Skydome - samples and increase. 

Today was an intriguing lesson as there was soo much to learn. Although I will be using this technique for my final, what I will be doing next will be focusing more on match-moving and understanding rendering in Maya. 

Fig.2 - Matchmoving - Live Video

Fig.3 - Working in Maya - Live Video