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reflex problems
im doing a project where we morph a young boy to a teenager to a man to an old man.
ive basically got motion morph working however there are some issues i need clarified.
at the moment we are using test HD footage but the footage quality is bad and massive motion blur. i find all characters have horrible deformations where the hands cover the body probably due to motion blur. im unable to get a precise mask. is this typical? or is it possible to layer the masks to ‘cut out’ the mask above from the mask below or some other technique to let reflex know what are the clothes an what are the hands.
eventually this will be shot on arri camera hi quality but agency wants to see test and i think i may have gone as far as I can go.
im doing rough masks for all body parts on one piece of footage then copy and pasting them and reforming them on other footage so i can match vertices somewhat. after that I go back and refine
all character wear shorts and for the shorts i am doing frame by frame adjustments to compensate for cloth movement. is this typical? but at some points i also get 2 masks in the same place…sometimes the hand mask is in the same place as the short mask. how does reflex know which is which?
i tried using the after effects of keylight > layer..autotrace to automate mask creation but reflex doesnt like because it recreates mask on every frame changing vertex count. could be a nice workflow otherwise.
at the moment im im using mask expansion and opacity to speed up the transition to hide the errors..but of course client wants slower transitions…damn them …lol
so 2 questions overall. are my problems just than i need a good film transfer with higher shutter speed (no mo blur) and does reflex specify an mask order to help it understand if a hand is over a body/
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4 Replies
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There is no layering in RE:Flex via mattes as there is in Twixtor PRO right now. Since it’s in Twixtor PRO would be nice to add it in RE:Flex as well I agree. Right now in some circumstances you do have to do it in 2 passes because of that.
I am not sure there is a cure for bad footage. In general for effects no motion blur is better, also that it can always be readded in post with a tool like ReelSmart Motion Blur.
Pierre
RE:Vision Effects -
yeah looks like well shoot in high speed. what strategies should i use for a multi pass approach.
for example, if im doing an arm only on a walk cycle do i do my masking (in AE) on both arms then make a boundary mask of exactly the same dimensions?
in one of your other posts it seemed you were saying boundary masks were critical for this approach. i also found making both source and destination mask useful as was moving the masks totally off the screen when i get overlap.
again were morphing a young boy to a youth to a man to an old man in a profiled run cycle…man that is a lot of masking…
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I was thinking in your case you are better to work with alpha matted straight layers
however since I get details by bits for side-way run cycle to run cycle
to save you some work, you might consider to retime the old guy to the young guy first so the run cycle match first (same front leg with maximum extent for both – and hopefully they will have the same arm cycle when they run)hopefully they are running over green screen on the same thread mill or something and with a locked-off camera
and maybe try to consolidate the the morph within a particular cycle and as a first pass just try to tidy the dissolve with RE:Flex
one idea is to split the morph top down in two using RE:Flex per shape morph and blend so for example if the morph works fine for left leg front but has issue with right arm front (the other cycle) then you can like that morph the leg on one half cycle and then the top on the other half cycle. It’s hard to know in advance but to be able to make a part of the morph happen real fast in part that don’t work well usually saves a lot of work.
Pierre
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right now theyre talking about using a motion control system and having the people run along a pier hopefully green screened. Might be a lot easier and cheaper using treadmill as you suggest
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