Compositing actor to 3D virtual set

[Evan Robinson]

I probably did not give you enough info to answer the question, so ask as many as you need.

[Jeff Brown]

One thing you could clear up, Evan (can’t tell from your wording):
You are tracking the actor footage, which has the moving camera? Or you are tracking the virtual set footage?

2 big things to prevent slipping:

Make sure the track solves for the proper field of view (lens), then duplicate that in the 3D set. I’ve only used SynthEyes for 3D tracking, not sure if AE gives you this info.

Also, make sure the scale of everything is correct; you actually need to use “real” units.

-Jeff

[Evan Robinson]

I am tracking the live footage. Is it better the track the virtual set?? Also the virtual set is some thing that i made. You said

Make sure the track solves for the proper field of view (lens), then duplicate that in the 3D set

Can you please explain that better, Thanks

[Darby Edelen]

[Evan Robinson] “I am tracking the live footage.”

What does the live footage look like? How is the camera moving? Do you have tracker markers/parallax stands on a green screen? If your talent is moving in the shot, do you have them matted out from the tracking?

Darby Edelen

[Evan Robinson]

The actor nor the green screen is moving, There is not much parallax, and even if there were 3d camera tracker built in can not manually add user features

[Darby Edelen]

[Evan Robinson] “The actor nor the green screen is moving”

You really shouldn’t need to track in that case. Ideally you would have information from the day of the shoot such as camera height, distance from subject and focal length. With those variables nailed down it shouldn’t be too hard to orient a virtual camera in such a way as to match the perspective in the shot.

If there’s no camera movement in the shot I’m not sure how any camera tracker would be able to produce a usable solve.

Darby Edelen

[Evan Robinson]

You must have misunderstood me, there is camera movement, but the actor is not moving.

[Darby Edelen]

Okay then, back to the drawing board.

The built-in 3D Camera Tracker in AE doesn’t have as many ways to adjust the track/solve as other tools so you may be pretty much stuck. You might try specifying a field of view for the solve or masking out some portions of the frame if the tracks are bad there, but there’s not much else you can do.

Darby Edelen

[Evan Robinson]

The track is fine, in fact, the shot tracks really well. l just don’t understand how to get this 2d layer of my actor in the 3d virtual set with the actors feet touching the ground of my virtual set. I can position the floor correctly, it seems to work, but when i go the the custom view 3, i see that the actors feet are not really touching the floor. So if i add a 3d light, the actors seems to be on the ground till you see the shadow, and you can tell that the actor is actually floating above the ground. What i did was make my actor’s layer 3d, which moves it out of position. I then position the 3d layer of my actor to to fill the entire camera like its 2d equivalent layer. Then i parent the 3d layer of the actor to the camera, so it is always in front of camera. Is that correct?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

It sounds like you’re confident that you’ve tracked the backing plate well enough to do the job. I assume that your confidence is based on trying out the solve by actually placing solids or some other layer into the scene. If this is the case, then re-position the actor’s Anchor Point to his feet. Then Shift+Parent (new feature in CS6) the actor to the solid.

Shift+Parent forces the child layer to adopt the parent layer’s (the solid) transform properties. IOW, ensure that a solid can be placed into the solved scene to test for the accuracy.

If this doesn’t help then post a result to show what the composite looks like. And do let us know the solve stats.

HTH
RoRK

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