Production Update: Something Personal.

Taking a short break from some of the game animation I have been doing, I've been working on (or at least trying...grr) on the second half of my personal project, which is another composited piece with the dinosaur rig I used in Specialist Animation 2!

My plan for this 10 second sequence is to animate the dinosaur chasing my friend across the screen, and knocking him over. I was excited about the awesomeness of this idea, but I have had such problems camera tracking this footage since Major Project begun, it's almost killed me. Initially I used the same tracking software we used in Specialist Animation 2, which was Boujou. However, for some reason Boujou would only track my sequence into multiple camera solves, instead of just 1, which I could not use. So, my tutor suggested I use PFTrack, which is the program the VFX students use at our uni. Long sotyr short, it eventually worked in PFTrack, but I couldn't line up the 3D scene in Maya, so half-way through emailing my tutor that it was impossible, I tried Boujou again, and....It freaking worked. GUH.

I'm still having to try to a little guesswork to get it to line up, but at least I have something to work with now, yay!

Phew.

Here is the filmed sequence the dinosaur will be placed in:



And this is the rough animatic I did in Pre-Production that I never showed, to show the rough placement of where the dinosaur will be.

Boujou progress screenshot.