Filming the footage
Following a review to the provided assets, and none of the resources meeting the of my project, I decided to head out to the countryside with a Cannon Eos 650 XLR to shoot the footage for the sequence.
Using a 35mm lens, the below image shows a single frame of that early shoot.
Stabilisation and Camera Tracks
Following the filming of the footage, camera trackers were placed over the rendered JPG’s of the footage (converted using a Write node from the .mov). A tracker node was then placed onto the footage from frame one (8 separate tracks and an average track) to track movement before adding in a transform stabilise node to reduce the camera motion, transform node to account for the stabilised image shifting (along with a constant and merge to ensure the transform was showing the footage in frame) along with a reformat node to bring the footage size back to 1080p.
Lens Distortion and ST Maps
Following the tracking and stabilisation of the footage, it’s now time to apply the Lens Distortion using the same techniques explained in an earlier post. As I shot the footage using a 35mm Lens and know the camera model, the lens distortion and ST Map was as accurate as possible. These are then attached to the original, stabilised footage along with a retime node to write the ST Map undistorted to 350 frames so that the footage is an appropriate length for the final composited image.
3D Camera Projection
After writing out the undistorted image sequence, the camera tracker was added with many points on the point cloud the ensure that the 3D Camera projection will hold up in Maya properly ahead of the introduction of the CG Assets.
Creating the HDR Image
The final part of the early process is to take to varying exposure stills I took from the shoot and use them to create an HDR Image that will be used as my Skydome in Maya – this process used a couple of the shots, but did not include the creation of a 360 Panoramic shot, as the lighting and cloud cover for the day was at a level that I intend to manipulate using Maya’s skydome settings.
