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.