Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

Hello fellow animators! I've been comtemplating the idea of combining Live Action Video and 3D Animation into one scene, and I was wondering if any of you who have done this before would have any pointers or suggestions - what to do, what not to do, what really not to do... those kind of things ;). I know some teams have done this in the past.. and even those who haven't, if you know something that might be useful feel free to post it. Thanks! :)

Could you post a story board??? putting live video is as easy as loading up a movie in the material editor and pasting it onto a box (I am not joking).

He's right. Our 2001 Animation had live video in the background of our real robot balancing the bridge behind the animated robot balancing the bridge. If our site had a working link, I'd link it to you. Let me check on that

Well I'm not thinkin as of having an actual video playing in the animation... rather have actual real people in a 3-d environment.. or vise versa.

Oddly enough, the winner from 2000 had an animated playing field with robots driving around, and then they took a shot of the player station with real humans driving and throwing balls towards the trough goals. It is possible, but Im not exactly sure how to do it.

The easist thing would be a green screen. Other than that I believe it is more like 2-d animating to get that 3-d effect.

This year we have a guy on our team who is really, really good with video editting and things like that. So I don't think it's a question of how/will we be able to do this, I just don't wanna run into some unforseign consequence or something.

If you would be willing to switch to Maya you can just switch to Maya Live and model and animate while looking at the footage/tracking devices.
I'm not sure if 3DS Max can use movies as a background- but you could link a plane to the camera and make it transparent with the models and full smoothshading and textures viewable.Then when rendering either take to plane out and just add the video in through Alpha Channels etc.. in Premiere, Combustion, Shake etc.
Just make sure that there are no Bleeding Color Edges or Lighting differences of it will look very crappy

I believe team 65 did something like that in 2000 too.

Re: Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

Lock the camera. If the camera is stationary, it'll be far easier for you to put in animation that appears to fit. If the camera moves and the lighting and perspective changes, animated things will look very, very bad unless you're an utterly incredible animator.

Things like blue screen or green screen are used to put live-action actors into a computer generated world. Putting computer generated characters into a live-action world is easier -- and has been done to some extent or another through traditional animation for about 80 years.

Notable films include Walt Disney's early Alice films, Mary Poppins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Jurassic Park.

The recently released Collector's Edition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? has a pretty good documentary and the process and challenge of integrating animation into live-action and even making it look three-dimensional. If you don't own, I'd suggest getting your hands on a copy and watching that.

Re: Re: Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

Incredible animator? More like a person who knows how to use Post-Production Programs.
I know that in After Effects you can create a synthetic light to match the one in the Animation. (Keyframing or tracking)
And you can create a primative (Biped) in 3ds, Maya, XSI etc. and match it's movements to the one in video so it will have shadows on sufaces to correspond w/ the position of the live-action character.
It's Not that hard when you have programs to track the motion instead of you:
Maya Live (In Maya Unlimited)
Match Mover
etc...

Re: Re: Re: Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

Well, if you're using software to animate for you, that wouldn't make you an animator, would it?

Furthermore, the FIRST animation competition is based around 3D Studio MAX. You should actually be using the software upon which the contest is judged. Entries that use Maya or any other software should, in my opinion, be disqualified.

Despite all of that, I still won't believe that producing a high quality result is as easy as you'd like to believe. The animations produced for FIRST are not professional quality -- nor even close in most respects. Produce something that shows these tools in use and then let others judge the result.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

:rolleyes: :confused:
Do you know anything about tracking?!:
Tracking does not animate it for you it just creates points of reference and matches them to a ref model
As for using other 3d programs- i don't think that there is anything wrong w/ that.
Just because FIRST gives you a EDU license for 3DS Max doesn't mean that you have to use it for EVERYTHING. Different Programs have different benefits.
3ds Max= Low Res Modeling and game design
Maya= Everything but Lightining Fast renderer and a Versitile Compostiter
So according to you, using Premiere to Add captions or titles would be cheating?

If I had Maya, I'd learn how to use it... not for this competition specifically, but for working in the field of Animatoin. Companies look for well-rounded animators that can adapt to many situations (and therefore should be able to use mulitple programs to animate.)

Thanks for all the info. so far! Keep it coming, this will no doubt benefit me (and possibly others) down the road :)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Live Action Video - 3D Animation Combination
 

If you using a "inventor" to invent for you, that wouldn't make you one would it? :p

I agree with you Krass, unfort. that is not the case, as long as one thing in your animation uses 3ds max (it can even be a box) than it is considered legal. :(

Producing a high quality result actually is not all that much the material. Yeah you need a decent material to look cool. However it is all in the way you beef it up, (camera angles, lighting etc...)

Also I disagree, that a lot of these animations are very close to being professionally done, the fact that a lot of us do not have a green screen is what renders us (no pun intended). I am sure a lot of people here would be able to do near professional quality (maybe because some teams actually have animators on them) if they had the materials to do so.