Tracking Update

Today Phil and I had a chat about what had been going on with my tracking. We came to the conclusion that at this point in time continuing to try and track footage that Matchmover was not responding to very well would not be the most productive of things to do in the amount of time left on the project as there is no guarantee that it will eventually track correctly being that the quality is not very good.

Instead, I will be using the much better quality photographs I took while at Somerset House to set my garden in. Of course the animation of my objects, the sound-scape and everything else I intended to do to my footage to make the garden as authentic as possible will still feature in the stills, the only change is that there is no camera movement now. This is something I intend to try and achieve in After Effects.

These are all of the photographs I captured at Somerset House, I'm glad to say I managed to get one for each corner and side so I should be able to do a lot with them. The only thing I need to do to them is Photoshop my tracking markers and equipment out because even with the chance of covering them with objects, there is still the possibility that not all of them will be covered or that they will be covered with translucent objects.

Another thing might be to crop and straighten some of them up a bit because a few are noticeably wonky which is a bit off putting to look at. 

The Tracking Process... So Far

I spent the weekend sitting at the computer sticking lots of little crosses all over my footage in an attempt to track it for Maya. It's actually quite therapeutic clicking away at this, that is until you realise you've spent a good few hours at it and it's still not working or it tricks you into thinking it is and oh no, nope it isn't.
Yet, I can say I still enjoyed myself as it was something different from what I normally do. That is not to say it is working now though!

For the tracking of the footage to be successful you have to look out for several things.

- All tracking points are corresponding to distance.
- They are not behind the footage or the camera.
- Or sitting in the camera.
-The points do not jitter about on the spots they are tracking.
- Any grey points are not being used usefully in the track.
- Red points must be fixed or deleted.
- A clean sweep of green points is normally heading in the right direction.
-The grid/coordinate system must be positioned in a suitable way.

Unfortunately it looks like my footage doesn't want to be tracked as after another go tonight after talking with Alan I am still to get anywhere further with it. There are still jittering points showing the track has not been fully successful and other things such as points behind the camera and footage or even inside the camera are still appearing. Matchmover sometimes decides to take a fully green list of tracks and turn lots of them red or yellow after solving to the camera again which is not a good sign as well.

However, here are some screenshots of my tracking process.

Points are all green!

Adding the points and solving to camera.

Cleaning up the tracks.

Getting a courtyard type shape from the points in 3D view.

Points behind the camera.

Points inside the camera!

3D cones corresponding to tracked points on footage.

Modelling the Sculptures

I have now finished modelling all of my sculptures properly as before I had rough tests for the majority of them and they all needed adjustments, some more than others.  Some of them needed to be started from scratch to be corrected but I am happy with the final results.

HDR Complete

It's been a bit crazy trying to sort this out but with Alan's help I can now say it is ready to be used in maya!

Merging all of the previous photoshopped photographs in Photoshop using the tool, merge to HDR Pro gave this result which you can adjust.

Alan then tried it out in Maya for me using image based lighting and the only issue seemed to be the seam of the globe which I will have to be careful with due to not wanting reflections to catch the seam in them.

Unwrapped Chrome Ball Photographs Photoshopped

I have now photoshopped myself and the distortion out of my photographs and am ready to put them together into a final HDR image. I have tried following a couple of tutorials to create one in Photoshop but have found that I don't end up with the result I should have so I will have to talk to Alan about this.

Chrome Ball Photographs Unwrapped

Now that I'm all set to start bringing everything into maya I needed to arrange my chrome ball photograph into a HDR image. An important step is unwrapping the images in HDR Shop but before this can be done the images must be cropped in photoshop so that only the chrome ball reflection is showing. (See below)

I have now unwrapped my photographs, the next step is to photoshop myself out and fix the edges of the images.

Lowest (-3)

Low (-2)

Low (-1)

Middle (0)

High (1)

High (2)

Highest (3)

Garden Topography Finalised

Finally after a few hiccups and worries I have worked out how my Futurists' garden will be organised! I took 3 stills in after effects of one of my pieces of footage and worked on top of them in Photoshop to lay everything out. Obviously for different pieces of footage everything will be seen at different views but this will help me place everything in the correct sections.

Please note that the colours for the ground such as the paths are not final, I am working on Futurist patterned pieces to place here instead. These are just placeholders, as well as the outline drawings for sculptures, lights ect.