Replacing the writing on a rotating licence plate – am I on the right lines?

[Don Smith]

Thank you! Yes, the camera angle of view is the secret sauce!

Thank you very much for taking the trouble to make this demo for us. I’ll put it in my pocket and look like a genius one day when a similar need arises.

Don Smith

NewsVideo.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thanks, Don 🙂

Simon Ubsdell
hawaiki.co

[Andy Neil]

Simon, that’s a really great trick. This kind of thing is super helpful to people when working in 3D and you don’t see people show it off much in tutorials.

Andy

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107277729326633563425/videos

[Mark Suszko]

Simon, what about a different method, using the tracker and parenting the replacement logo plate to a null with the tracker?

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Mark Suszko] “Simon, what about a different method, using the tracker and parenting the replacement logo plate to a null with the tracker?”

My understanding was that this was a locked off shot with just the licence plate flipping over, so there’s nothing to track except the plate and there’s nothing you could track off that.

Unless I’m missing something.

The actual rotation animation part of this is surely really simple though, isn’t it?

Simon Ubsdell
hawaiki.co

[Gareth Randall]

Thanks again to Simon. Just FWIW, here’s what it eventually ended up as (these shots were intercut with other clips):

rotating licence plate final

[Simon Ubsdell]

That looks great – nice job!

Simon Ubsdell
hawaiki.co

[Bruce Breidbart]

Great tutorial. ” The actual rotation animation part of this is surely really simple though, isn’t it? ”

I’m trying to follow along, after using the camera and grid to help align my rectangle/outline (to round the edges) I still need to use the distort tool to make things look right. All is fine until I try to rotate the rectangle. I’m not even close. Any chance of you finishing your tutorial. Would you say that Gareth used a Photoshop file to fill in the license plate ?

thanks in advance

BB

[Gareth Randall]

[Bruce Breidbart] “Would you say that Gareth used a Photoshop file to fill in the license plate ?”

I did, mainly because PS has much better tools for doing that sort of thing than Motion does.

For the actual rotation, I moved the anchor point of the plate back in Z space just a little, and then keyframed the X rotation. After that it was just a matter of animating a mask to prevent parts of the licence plate being visible where they shouldn’t have been.

Here’s the project file for you to dissect. Unfortunately I couldn’t include the media, because the source clip I used is 1.3GB (1’25” of 1080p ProRes 422) and the Cow only allows 100MB maximum per upload. Motion doesn’t seem to offer a way to consolidate project files to only include the specific frames of the source media that actually get used in the project.

7320_licenceplaterotatenomedia.motn.zip

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Bruce Breidbart] “I’m trying to follow along, after using the camera and grid to help align my rectangle/outline (to round the edges) I still need to use the distort tool to make things look right.”

You shouldn’t need to use Distort and in fact if you do you won’t b able to get the rotation to look right.

You need to make sure you adjust the Camera Angle of View precisely as it’s this that gives you the final result – I went for a value of 35 degrees which seemed about right to me but I could be wrong.

[Bruce Breidbart] ” Would you say that Gareth used a Photoshop file to fill in the license plate ?”

As Gareth says, Photoshop is the easiest place to do a great-looking job, but I did knock this up for you entirely in Motion just to show you that it’s possible to do something OK:

I’ll try and do a proper tutorial on this shortly if I can find a moment.

Thanks for your interest.

All the best,

Simon Ubsdell
hawaiki.co