-
Advice for set extending/Adding close Buildings
Hello,
For a film im making, i have to add a few buildings to Actors and live footage. Essentially, i have to create an Edo period japanese village that my actors can be part of. (We’ll have some PA’s follow the actors around with a small Green screen to allow easy placement of buildings and less rotoscoping)
I’ve seen a LOT of set extending tutorials, from videocopilot, aetuts, creativecow, you name it. Problem is, they are all adding the
location in the distance. I need to add the location around the actor, to make it look like hes actually standing inside.Has anyone seen any tutorials on how to do this? Or does anyone have any advice, or seen a reel that i can try to learn from? Maybe this shouldnt even be called set extension, maybe its like set addition or something, but…just curious.
Thanks so much
-
15 Replies
-
Not set extension, it sounds like you’re looking for a virtual set.
To be honest, the principles of motion tracking are the same, but you will also have to focus on lots of good keying and rotoscoping. Check out the links in those pages and the comments at the bottom. There are lots of good resources there.
Don’t forget light wrapping!– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
-
Haha, thanks guys. Yeah, Virtual Set seems more like it, however, i will be adding the fake material to a real (empty field) location, so i honestly wasnt sure what it would be called.
I’ll check out those links, and defiently look into 300 and sin city. This wont shot on a complete green screen set as those movies were, but it should defiently help to know what they had to do.
The bummer is since im shooting this outside there will be changing light conditions, haha, and all i have for post work is myself and good old trusty after effects. Oh, how i love to give myself thy challenging assignments!
Would you guys recomend using 3d structures for the buildings, or stock photography brought from iphoto? My only problem with 3d composites is it might not blend in with the live elements of the shot, but stock photography…well…it completly limits the angle of the shot…
Thanks you guys!
-
All of the above posts being said, all truth and true, here’s a bit of encouragement- it is possible to do effects for a movie with AE and PSD:
https://www.fxguide.com/article463.html
Good luck!Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania -
Hey Dave,
I completly agree with you. I know this will look like crap unless i know what im doing, and that i have to know EVERYTHING before i go into this. Theres no point in spending a few thousand on armor and props if its gonna end up looking like a saturday morning cartoon.
We’ll be shooting with a 4-4-2 camera, so i wont have the full color field to choose from. I’m just wondering at this point if it would be easier to do a complete green screen set, that way at least things will blend together a lot better.
Oh, learning experiences! The more advice the merrier though, keep it coming!
Thanks guys.
-
Sorry, meant 4:2:2 camera, the Panasonic AG HPX170. Would it make the shoot a lot simpler to use a RED or something instead?
-
RED will give you a lot more to work with- so if you can, use that instead. Shoot at 4K all effects shots, even if your final will be 2k or HD. And get ready to upgrade the RAM on your AE workstation…
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania -
Yeah, i’ll pretty much need a new station in order to edit uncompressed Red (Currently using CS4, 8 gigs ram, Nvdia Geforce 9800 GT)
Just out of curiousity, why is it essential to not shoot on HDV, but better? I know 4 K resolution will be awesome in order to have control over the shot, and be able to scale as much as needed, but why is 4:4:4 so essential? I really need to read up on this…
-
If you get CS5 with a graphics card that can handle the Mercury Playback engine, I hear that you will adore working with RED footage.
As far as why color resolution matters for keying. Think about it this way: the less color resolution you have, the less color information there is. What does a keying effect or plugin do? It looks at colors to determine what’s background and what’s foreground. If you throw away ANY color information, you make the key worse.
This link may help.– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
-
Oh, thats right! I remember hearing about that a while back, the information just didnt stick. Thanks Mike, that makes complete sense!
-
As others have said, this ‘can’ be done with virtual 3D sets… but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do this with 2D graphics in 3D space… you just have to be really careful in your shot selection and camera movement. The bottom line is that you have to be somewhat knowlegeble about the subject. You have to know when, why and how you can get away with 2D (or 3D) tracking and 2D graphics vs a 3D tracking and integration workflow. I also (repectively) disagree with some folks regarding camera choice. You can pull good and believable keys with a 4:2:2 camera @ 720p or 1080p… you just have to be good at keying AND compositing.
In order to do this work you’ll have to be comfortable with the following subjects:
2D tracking
3D tracking/matchmoving
3D modeling
3D Painting/Texturing
3D Lighting
HDR Photography (including shooting mulit-exposure panoramas and creating sperical maps from those panoramas)
Compositing
Keying
RotoscopingHere are links to some resources that can lead you down the road of understand what you’re trying to do.
https://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=C4D_Matte_Paint_Extraction
https://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=Syntheyes_Complete_Training
https://videocopilot.net/tutorial/3d_crater_p1/
https://ssontech.com/content/pertute.htm
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up