7.
Finishing Mud
All
that was left was to render the shots off and composite them onto the live
footage. This is where the functionality of my script really comes into it’s
own. The Mud Men are to move out from behind a rock and then walk up round
and past the camera. All I would have to do is use a motion path and attach
the locator to the path then my group of animated Mud Men would walk up round
past the camera hopefully with no problem. I could also have however many
Mud Men I wanted, although several groups would perhaps need to be attached
to the path.
What
I required next was getting the right look for the render of the Maya file.
I
applied a wet shader onto the geometry and just had a single light source
coming from the moon. I gave it a blue light just to emphasize the moon colour
and because the footage is at night there is almost no apparent light so it
is quite hard to convincingly keep the look coherent. I have advised my brother
as how best to film the actual footage and for his completed film he will
have immaculate composite shots. So with the actual animation side of things
I will have one fully rendered shot of the fluid instanced keyframed
animation, and one render of the less fluid blendshaped
instanced animation plus a couple of rendered shots of the actual Mud Men
up close.
The
shot I was given to composite was a bit convoluted. I explained to my brother
the problems this gave rise to, so for his final he is going to fix the footage.
However my completion date was sooner than his so I would just have to butcher
the footage he already had.
I
tried two different methods, one with the exported still frame cleaned up
and having the Mud Men troop just walk up past the camera, another with the
original footage but using tracking on shake to compensate for the camera
shake, which was harder then the first version.