Cineversity

Hi,

I think I’m just missing it, but here’s what I’m doing:

I have camera projected an image sequence over geometry to match a camera move from syntheyes.

I would like to bake the movie to some of the geometry.

In the projection man tab I right click on the object and choose “bake texture.”

But from here…I only seem to be able to bake a single frame, not an entire movie.  Any tips on how to do this?

Thanks so much!
Biagio

Hi Biago,

Currently I’m traveling and teaching classes, so please excuse me that I ask to wait to the weekend to go into detail.

Any texture baking of an existing textures/movie will reduce the quality, it never increase quality. There must be an urgent reason to bake something like that in your project right now, to lower the quality.
However, “Camera Projection” is nothing else than a special way of UV projection in C4D. You can bake the UV information to the object (Object Manager>Tags > ... one of the two UVW commands/options).
I do not recommend that in general when the base is already a pixel based information.

UV-baking creates—if done well—the best quality possible for your movie “projection”, hence the same quality as projecting it per Camera.

The movie options (in the detail tab) is more an option to get data that is generated in C4D baked, so this doesn’t need to be calculated again, for example.

Again, I’m not often online these days, so I will check this them (if nothing else happens ;o) on Sunday or Monday.

Have a nice weekend
Sassi

Thanks, Sasssi, and good luck with your trip!  I’m rendering a project out right now and I’ll try to post when it’s done to explain what I was trying to do.  As always, thanks for your kind words and I’ll check back next week.

Best,
Biagio

Here’s the test WIP shot I was working on, based on one of my FXPHD classes.

http://vimeo.com/36941034

Definitely still needs a lot of work, but the idea was that I wanted to camera map the “movie” to those doors opening up on the doors so the texture would move with them.  When camera mapped, the doors would move but of course the mapping wouldn’t. 

I’m planning a bigger shot like this on an upcoming production, and would like, if possible, to map the actual movie to the doors so that the lighting would match what’s around it.  Of course, I think that will need to be tweaked as well, so any ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Biagio

Hi Biagio,

Thanks for your patience.

If I get this right (from the example above, ... I assume I do) you like to use the footage from a practical camera directly in C4D to avoid compositing of CG and practical footage. The practical footage is here and for the following considered as background footage (in opposite to project a part of it into the scene like a partial texture). Background defines here that the footage has the same result ion and is applied 1:1 is size full or partially over the “screen” area. If only the Picture/door area is in discussion, things might be different, but as you mention Syntheyes, the idea is maybe given as discussed in the following. Light to projected areas is not that simple, as shade and light is nothing that is easily mixed among projected and illuminated… think about it: You would illuminate a shadow, to make the shadow vanish when light falls on the shadow, as it is in the footage!

I would not recommend that, based on the following reason:

If you use practical footage to camera project this in the complete scene, you must remove the lens-distortion from the practical footage before you project it, otherwise, the result can be difficult, as the projection isn’t distorted at all (in terms of lens distortion.) This would introduce the first quality loss.

Secondly, the footage projected completely to the whole frame, if possible at all after lens-diostrotion removal, creates the problem that the rendered pixel might be not exactly the projected pixel. This partial or at all. The reason might be less in rounding errors, but more likely in Anti alias and MIP blurring. This lowers the second time the footage quality.

If you got that far without losing too much, keep in mind that the practical footage has already motion blur and perhaps depth of field blur in it. The objects in C4D have that not directly, you need to apply this to the objects in C4D. BUT certainly not again to the objects that carry the projection. Any additional Motion Blur or DOF blur would always be different to the one that the C4D not projected objects carry.

Not really a loss, but mostly underestimated, the color space. If your gamma is baked in your footage that you project, it might be not pulled correctly out (to be linear), in that way you might add this later on again on top of the baked color profile, which supports the CG look.

Noise in the footage. If you have not 100% noise free footage, the projection areas carry noise, the C4D objects by default do not of course. In that way you mix the noise inside the image and if not couterbalanced with Object-buffers and compositing, you get something ugly on the end.

Please have a look in the 54 part Integration series, that will be published here soon. As I believe we have some more points to discuss. I stop here, as I believe I have mentioned enough points, why I would not recommend to Camera project footage in the same format over the complete image, to “slap-compose” C4D objects.

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The way to do it, to save the highest quality, is to not touch at all the practical footage. In many cases even the Lens distortion is not removed. Of course to get a proper track from Syntheyes you must care about lens distortion as other wise the tracking result would be sloppy. For any C4D work the tracking must be un-distorted as well for Camera-Projection, always without (!!) lens distortion.
The CG material can be rendered in any way to become then in the Compositing application the right lens-distorsion, noise, color correction and all the little steps that integrate everything, not to mention the need for Light wrap (or Light Glow in some cases), Light interaction and Reflection interaction (in both cases bi-directional) might be needed as well. Thinking of an earlier discussion here on CV2, you might remember that I mentioned that projection misses critical parts for Reflection for example, especially for GI illumination.
In an upcoming series (Making Of JET) I will show how I have created the complete set in C4D as simulation just to gain all the info ration needed, with out showing that simulated set at all as a direct capture in the footage.

Camera projection with practical footage is a longer theme and I work on more material, but as you might see on the many points that I mentioned, that is not just done with a dozen of tutorials. This needs an deep understanding of the material that you work with, and how to examine what works and what not. I use camera mapping since the late ‘90s, so my experience reaches deep in that area. Thanks for your patience, until I can deliver all parts. There are some reasons to prefer still images for projection or specific practical footage for projection. I hope I can buy my next camera soon to supply as well here the some stuff to play with. ;o), standard broad cast cameras (even: HD, 3chip, 10bit/c; 4:2:2, my current one) isn’t working here very well, for that specific purpose.

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The need for a compositing application (NUKE for example, well After Effects as well as to certain degree) and the knowledge of integration (which means not only to prepare the C4D scene to deliver all information for the composition… hence Integration is not Compositing, compositing is a sub part of the integration work)

I hope this information above delivers enough to work with to get “Production Quality” for your efforts with Camera-Projection, and I hope as well as that the hundreds of tutorials that “we” will release soon, supports such workflow.

Have a great weekend

Sassi

Wow!  As always, Sassi, you amaze with your generous, thorough answers.

I’m glad you told me the 54 part series isn’t up yet…I was looking all over for it and just thought I was missing it   Really looking forward to it, and the JET series.  Read all about it after your last post.  I believe those tutorials will help many of us a GREAT deal.

Thanks for your answers above, and I will keep all of that in mind. 

You make a great point about the noise in the footage, and you have me thinking about using a still image shot at higher resolution, camera mapped and patched, instead of the actual hand held footage, then maybe giving the “taking camera” movement based on a hand held shot so it still feels like it was caught in camera.

I will try that and see how it goes!

Thanks again,
Biagio

Hey Biagio,

Thanks for your interest. Yes I hope it will support. I have invested quite some time into these. As I might mention “more than often”, ;o) to know the before and after “stuff” around C4D helps to streamline the process.

As usual, there are no hard “one and only” rules to anything, but some steps might lead to trouble and some save time, others keep the quality. There is always a decision between time/effort and quality.

In any case, I tend to stick with the idea of keeping things separated as long as possible, which leads to the most control.

Have fun

Sassi