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).
*Originally posted by Tyler Olds *
**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
*Originally posted by D.J. Fluck *
**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. **
I believe team 65 did something like that in 2000 too.
*Originally posted by Ryan Dognaux *
**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!
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.
*Originally posted by M. Krass *
**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. **
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…
*Originally posted by … *
**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… **
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.
*Originally posted by M. Krass *
**Well, if you’re using software to animate for you, that wouldn’t make you an animator, would it?
**
:rolleyes: 
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
*Originally posted by M. Krass *
**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. **
If you using a “inventor” to invent for you, that wouldn’t make you one would it? 
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.
Can you link me to some animations that are near-professional quality? I can’t recall seeing any in the years I’ve been doing this.
This skills you learn are useful, but the end result isn’t reflective of a complete set of skills as far as I’m concerned. Nor should they be, however. Professional animators, in both the digital realm and in traditional cel animation, aren’t responsible for an entire animation on their own. They specialize.
I’d disagree about “beefing things up,” however. I think, above all else, people tend to really, really abuse or misuse lighting, reflectivity, and textures and that’s probably what leads to the poor quality of many animations.
I agree with the misusing, give me time and ill find some for you trust me…
um… there were many professional quality animations… I believe Rage’s (173) could easily be qualified as “professional” grade. I can’t remember the other team numbers off the top of my head, but I too will get back to you on this…
We used live action in our animation this past year (2003 season) we had a bunch of rookie members and I wasn’t about to get into too much character animation. We shot a student on Green Screen and Composited him into a 3D Space Suite. All you saw was the head, but we could have done it the same way with anything.
If you put up story boards, like someone already asked, I can help you. There are many techniques based on the actual situation.
I agree you should gain as much knowledge about other programs. I frankly use more programs in this arena than anyone I know. However just because you may not know how to do something in one program doesn’t mean it cant be done. Video IS as simple as loading a clip instead of a still image. It can be mapped anywhere you can map images (even the Background). There is a free download of MAYA Learning Addition that you can learn the software. You just cant render without a watermark going across the frame.
My advice is to design and render in layers around the video. Background, Foreground and the video itself. This is helpful with full 3D sets as well. There are many times the Background is finished weeks ahead of the finalized character or main object animation, If you render it and use it as a BG video clip you save time on the final render. Or even better, render the BG as 24bit video and the mid and Foreground as 32bit video (with alpha Chanel embedded) then you can composite either in Aftereffects, 3DStudio it self, or Post Process in 3DS Max.) This way you can make changes and add effect to one layer with out messing with all the others.
Quality of Animations
There are several high quality animations out there. There are also more that need tons of more work. So what. I bet each member learns a lot and then comes back the next year and learns more. Frankly I’m offended by a non-animator criticizing the quality and skill of the ones that put the sweat and blood into it. It takes a lot to do what these students are doing. Based on a survey I did last season. There are very few teams that have professional guidance. So why expect someone with no professional guidance to preform like a professional?
Inventor Smentor
Oh is there a real Inventor Goddess out there! You should gain more respect for us animators. If your so good, why aren’t you an Animation Goddess or 3DS Max Goddess. Even better, Why don’t you DRAW an animation at 30 frames per second (or figure out how to draw 29.97fps (drop-frame) Then post it on-line or send us all CD’s, with out using a computer! Because in your mind the computer seems to mess up the process. OK thats too tough of an assignment. Use the computer and let us judge it. Maybe it will help you top be less critical of others. It takes years of talent and skill to make this stuff look good. Our animators spend more time on their projects for the competition than any other student member of the Robotics team. (we had one other pass them this year for the first time since we started an animation team and that guy was the captain of the whole Robotics team). So it must take a long time to get the computer to do all that work!