On my second 1 to 1 with Dom, we had planned to track a shot with a good background and foreground, download arrows or spears and have them thrown at a character. The plan changed as the footage I found was not so good for this idea so Dom had found a great video of a forest where the camera was going under a tree trunk. So we focused on tracking the shot and then adding some animation on top of it, like a character going under the tree.
We began on 3DEqualizer tracking the tree, then the space under the tree, then the floor, the background right and left side and by the end this is what we had.
We were able to track all the points in 2 hours and finish the 3DE work to jump to maya, no errors this time, everything went super well even when running Warp4 and the lens distortion which normally is where some problems may arrise.
On maya, we already had the project set with the three extra folders: 3de_scenes, mel scripts and models, so we just had to open a scene and import the mel script and the footage. This is where the first problem came, the footage was moving when setting the view for the camera, so we had to set the image plane manually and add the footage to it and the problem was solved.
The next step was to center the floor points with the ground grid from maya, this way it is easier to know where the floor is, so we can go to edit mesh – create geometry and create a shape from the floor points. With our cg floor we could add a few more things to the scene such as the tree where we created a cilinder and edited its geometry to look more like a tree. I ended up adding a few more tiny trunks on the floor. Now the scene is ready to have a character animated on top.
