IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:03 | Hi! I'm George Maestri and welcome to Maya
2010 Getting Started with MatchMover,
| | 00:08 | Toxik and BackBurner.
| | 00:10 | Maya 2010 made very few
changes to the main application,
| | 00:14 | so the big new features are three
applications that are now bundled with Maya:
| | 00:18 | MatchMover, a powerful camera matching
application, Toxik, a node-based compositor
| | 00:23 | and BackBurner, which is a network
rendering manager for Maya, 3ds Max and Toxik.
| | 00:29 | First, we'll use MatchMover to seamlessly
match 3D animation to live action footage.
| | 00:33 | I'll show how MatchMover can
automatically match cameras with very little effort.
| | 00:38 | After that, we'll explore some of the
manual functions that allow fine control
| | 00:42 | over camera matching.
| | 00:44 | Next, we'll explore BackBurner, a
network rendering manager originally available
| | 00:48 | for 3ds Max, which now
supports both Maya and Toxik.
| | 00:53 | We'll look at how to set up network
managers and servers, as well as how to
| | 00:56 | monitor network rendering.
| | 00:59 | Finally, we'll explore Toxik, a robust
node-based compositor that can be used to
| | 01:03 | finish your projects.
| | 01:04 | I'll show you how to use Toxik's
unique interface and also how to seamlessly
| | 01:08 | composite 3D footage with live action.
| | 01:11 | We'll then create special effects, animate
our compositions and render the final output.
| | 01:16 | So, if you're ready, let's dive into
Maya 2010 getting started with MatchMover,
| | 01:21 | Toxik and BackBurner.
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| Using the exercise files and relinking media| 00:00 | Now if you're a lynda.com premium
subscriber, you'll have the exercise files to
| | 00:04 | go along with this course.
| | 00:06 | Now this particular course has two
sets of exercise files. One is called
| | 00:12 | ExerciseFiles_64bit. The other is
called ExerciseFiles_32bit, and now we did
| | 00:19 | this because of MatchMover.
| | 00:21 | If you're using the 64bit version of
MatchMover, download the 64bit exercise files.
| | 00:28 | If you're using the 32bit version,
download the 32bit version of the exercise
| | 00:34 | files and regardless of which one
you've downloaded, go ahead and place it on
| | 00:39 | the desktop and then when I tell you to
go into be Exercise Files folder, just
| | 00:43 | go into the one that you've downloaded.
| | 00:46 | Once you're in the Exercise Files
folder, you'll notice we have one folder
| | 00:50 | for each chapter and that contains
the assets that you'll need for that
| | 00:55 | particular chapter.
| | 00:56 | So, if you're using the exercise files,
go ahead and download those now and
| | 01:00 | place them on your desktop.
| | 01:04 | Now, even when you install files on
the desktop, you may encounter situations
| | 01:09 | where a program can't find files
that are referenced in a project.
| | 01:13 | So for each of these, you may have to
kind of reconfigure the program just to
| | 01:18 | make sure that you find the proper files.
| | 01:20 | For example, in MatchMover, if you do
a File > Open and we go to our Desktop
| | 01:26 | then we go into our Exercise File,
let's say we open one of the MMF files.
| | 01:33 | When we do this, we may get an error,
like this, which says it Cannot find the
| | 01:38 | following file and what it's looking
for is really just a JPEG sequence.
| | 01:43 | So all we have to do is remember that
file name, find the JPEG sequence and Open
| | 01:48 | it and then we can proceed with the lesson.
| | 01:53 | If you're using Maya and you find a
situation where your missing files,
| | 01:57 | typically, it will be in the image
planes that go along with a file.
| | 02:02 | For example, if I Open a scene such as
Building 02 in our Chapter 2 project,
| | 02:09 | you'll notice that it comes in, but we
get an error here that we can't load the
| | 02:13 | image file, which is the backing
plate for this particular scene.
| | 02:18 | So, in order to load that image plane,
all you have to do is go to View > Image
| | 02:23 | Plane and Image Plane Attributes.
| | 02:26 | And then in your Attribute Editor, it
will show up and we can just go here to
| | 02:30 | Image Name and find that file.
| | 02:33 | Now the folders are basically
named the same as the Maya files.
| | 02:37 | So here we have Building 02 and we
just go to Building Shot, select that and
| | 02:43 | Open it and now we have our
scene all put back together.
| | 02:50 | There may also be a situation where
Toxik might not be able find your image file.
| | 02:54 | So for example, if we open one of our
exercise files, go to the Desktop and, for
| | 02:59 | example, go to Chapter 04 and we
select CityShot, one of the things that may
| | 03:04 | happen is that some of
these will show up with red Xs.
| | 03:08 | All we have to do with
these is just reconnect them.
| | 03:11 | For example with this one, notice here
in the Path what the name of the file is.
| | 03:16 | It's Robot, Robot City.
| | 03:18 | So all we have to do is just reload this file.
| | 03:22 | Click here and again just go to my
Desktop, Exercise Files, that same chapter
| | 03:30 | and this one is called Robot, so
double-click on that and select that.
| | 03:36 | You'll notice how that asset comes in and
then we're going have to do that for each asset.
| | 03:41 | So this one is called Shadow, so again,
we're just going to go to our Desktop,
| | 03:47 | the same chapter, find the Shadow
folder and load that and then also one for
| | 03:57 | CityShot, which we can find
here and we can just open that.
| | 04:09 | So once we have all of those together
you can see how we have that final output.
| | 04:14 | So, with each of these, it depends on
how you set up your desktop, but you may
| | 04:18 | actually have to go and reload
the files into the application.
| | 04:23 | With that in mind, let's
go ahead and get started.
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1. Basic MatchMoverWorking within the MatchMover interface| 00:00 | So let's go ahead and start off with MatchMover.
| | 00:03 | Let's take a look at the
basic MatchMover interface.
| | 00:07 | As you can see,
MatchMover is fairly well laid out.
| | 00:09 | We have a very big viewport here to view
the footage that we're going to be matching.
| | 00:14 | Along the top, we have some standard menus
such as File, Open, Close, that sort of thing.
| | 00:20 | Along here, we have some icons for some
of the commonly used functions such as
| | 00:24 | New file, Open and Save and so on.
| | 00:27 | And on the same line is this pulldown
menu which switches the interface from
| | 00:32 | Light, which is what we're seeing now, to
Full, which gives you a lot more options
| | 00:37 | and a lot more control over
how you match your footage.
| | 00:41 | For right now, we're just going to
be looking at the Light interface.
| | 00:43 | So, I'm going to go ahead and switch that back.
| | 00:46 | Now below here, we have a browser which
basically contains all the objects and
| | 00:51 | tracking information that
we're going to have in our scene.
| | 00:53 | Now this will grow as we go
through and track stuff in the scene.
| | 00:59 | Now the big window here is obviously
the viewport and this is where we can
| | 01:03 | look at our footage.
| | 01:04 | We can scrap through this footage using
the timeline or we have play controls here.
| | 01:13 | So, if I just hit Play/Stop, I can
play through the footage and stop it.
| | 01:19 | You can also go a frame at a time, go
to the End, just like with anything.
| | 01:23 | You can also play the
footage backwards, if you want.
| | 01:26 | Now, we also have some controls here,
which allow us to Loop the footage or do
| | 01:33 | PingPong if we need to.
| | 01:34 | Now if we want to we also can create
work areas just by grabbing this little
| | 01:40 | yellow triangle and
bracketing in the footage that we want.
| | 01:45 | So, if we're only working with a small
portion of this footage, we can just have
| | 01:49 | that footage active.
| | 01:52 | So, we don't have to go through the
entire bit, if we want to work on it
| | 01:55 | a section at a time.
| | 01:57 | And these numbers actually show up
here. If I wanted to, I could actually
| | 02:02 | type that in as well.
| | 02:05 | Along here, we also have an
option to control our frame rate.
| | 02:09 | Now the Viewport itself can be either
2D, which is what we've been looking at,
| | 02:15 | which is basically just the
footage itself, or we can look at it in 3D,
| | 02:20 | because what we're doing here is we're
looking at 2D footage and computing 3D information.
| | 02:28 | That's what match moving is is you're
taking this piece of flat footage and
| | 02:31 | deriving your 3D information.
| | 02:34 | So once we've derived that, we want to
take a look at that within MatchMover
| | 02:38 | and we can do that by clicking on this
little icon here that switches between 2D and 3D.
| | 02:45 | Now it's a little confusing here because
when you're in 3D mode, it actually says
| | 02:49 | 2D and the button is really
saying "Take me to 2D," or "Take me to 3D."
| | 02:55 | So once we're in 3D mode, we can
actually navigate, just like we can in any 3D
| | 03:00 | applications, such as Maya.
| | 03:02 | We have a number of navigation controls here.
We can actually pan, we can truck
| | 03:07 | or dolly, we can rotate and
we can tilt left and right.
| | 03:13 | We can also use just standard commands.
| | 03:16 | So if I Hold down the Alt key+Left-Click,
I pan, Right-Click rotates.
| | 03:25 | If you down Ctrl+Alt+Left Click,
you're going to Dolly and if you
| | 03:33 | Right-Click, you zoom.
| | 03:35 | Now the difference between Dolly and
Zoom is you're actually moving the camera
| | 03:39 | versus zooming the camera.
| | 03:40 | So, you're actually physically
moving the camera when you Dolly.
| | 03:43 | So you're actually moving camera closer
further way and this is standing in the
| | 03:47 | same place and just
increasing your angle of view.
| | 03:50 | So, those are some of the
basics of the MatchMover interface.
| | 03:53 | So, now that you're familiar with
them, let's go ahead and actually start
| | 03:56 | using MatchMover.
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| Importing footage| 00:00 | When starting a match in MatchMover,
the first thing you need to do is load an
| | 00:05 | image sequence and we can do
that by going File>Load Sequence.
| | 00:09 | But before we do that, let's take
a look at the types of images that
| | 00:14 | MatchMover works with best.
| | 00:16 | I have got a couple of movies here and I
am going to open this one up first.
| | 00:20 | Now this is actually a pretty good
representative of a shaky cam type of shot.
| | 00:25 | Now one of the things about this
particular shot is that it has some really good
| | 00:29 | perspective changes.
| | 00:31 | When you give MatchMover footage that
has good perspective information, it'll
| | 00:35 | calculate the scene that much more accurately.
| | 00:39 | Let me show you what I mean
by perspective information.
| | 00:42 | So for example, here we've got this
light pole and the distance between the
| | 00:46 | buildings in the background and the light pole.
| | 00:49 | Now as we scroll and as the footage proceeds,
you can see how that distance gets a lot bigger.
| | 00:55 | This is really good information.
It tells MatchMover that this pole is a
| | 00:59 | lot closer than the building and the same
goes for a lot of these things in the scene,
| | 01:05 | because we have the camera moving from
one side of the street to the other and
| | 01:08 | this gives us good perspective information.
| | 01:10 | I am going to show you another shot
here, which actually doesn't have much
| | 01:15 | perspective information.
| | 01:19 | So, here we have a camera that's kind of
shaking, but really not much is going on
| | 01:24 | in terms of perspective.
| | 01:25 | If you notice the leaves upfront are
actually having some perspective changes,
| | 01:30 | but the actual background doesn't
really have that much information.
| | 01:35 | This is going to make it harder for
MatchMover to get accurate scene information
| | 01:40 | from the footage that you give it.
| | 01:42 | Now this isn't to say that
it's impossible to track the shot.
| | 01:45 | It's just going to take that much more
time and effort in order to get a good track.
| | 01:50 | Now another thing that MatchMover
needs is it needs good visual quality.
| | 01:55 | It needs good edges to determine a track.
| | 01:58 | So, if I have a piece of footage that's
like this, so you can see that, well I
| | 02:03 | actually do have quite a
bit of information here.
| | 02:06 | But if I wanted to actually make it more
MatchMover friendly, I could go through
| | 02:09 | and process that footage
to give it more contrast.
| | 02:13 | Sometimes in a low contrast scene
you might not have enough edges for
| | 02:18 | MatchMover to really track.
| | 02:20 | So processing the footage can help
MatchMover get a better bead onto where
| | 02:26 | everything is in the scene.
| | 02:28 | You could track the high contrast
version in MatchMover and then when you
| | 02:33 | actually go for your final composite,
you can actually bring up the original
| | 02:36 | footage and just swap that in.
| | 02:39 | So, the main point here is just to make
your footage as friendly to MatchMover
| | 02:43 | as possible to get the best results.
| | 02:47 | So once we have the footage that we
want, we can go ahead and load that into
| | 02:51 | MatchMover, so I am going to go ahead
and do File>Load Sequence and I'm in
| | 02:57 | Chap_01 of my Exercise Files
and the folder name is City_Shot.
| | 03:03 | Now notice here we have an
image sequence, not a movie file.
| | 03:07 | MatchMover does not support movie or AVI files.
| | 03:12 | It only supports image sequences.
| | 03:14 | So you can have any one of these bitmap
files, such as JPEG, Maya Images, TGA,
| | 03:20 | .TIFF, basically the usual suspects, and
these have to be in an image sequence.
| | 03:26 | So I am going to go ahead and Select my
first image of the sequence. Now there
| | 03:30 | are just JPEGs and the reason I chose
JPEGs is because they are little bit
| | 03:33 | smaller so they'll scrub faster.
| | 03:36 | I can set my Sequence Options here, such
as how long the sequence is, whether or
| | 03:41 | not there is Interlacing and
also Settings about the Camera:
| | 03:45 | Is the camera Free? Is it Fixed?
| | 03:48 | Is it Dollying?
| | 03:49 | That sort of stuff. What's the
Frame Rate? And also, is the Focal Length
| | 03:54 | Constant or Variable?
| | 03:56 | In other words, are you zooming the
camera or are you just keeping the camera
| | 04:00 | with a fixed lens and just moving it.
| | 04:03 | So, once I have all of that set,
let's go ahead and open the footage.
| | 04:07 | Once it comes in, you'll see it here, in
your little browser and we can scrub through.
| | 04:12 | So now, your footage is
successfully in MatchMover.
| | 04:16 | Now remember, better footage is going
to be better tracking and if you need to
| | 04:21 | process the footage to get a better
contrast, then go ahead and do that.
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| Automatic matching| 00:00 | Once you have your footage loaded,
you can start matching that footage.
| | 00:05 | There are several ways of doing this.
| | 00:06 | You can actually do it manually by
marking out points that you know are
| | 00:10 | stable within the image and then having
MatchMover track those, or you can do it automatically.
| | 00:17 | This is the first method
that we are going to use.
| | 00:18 | In fact, this is probably the
easiest way to use MatchMover.
| | 00:23 | So you'll find Automatic Tracking
under 2D Tracking and it's actually F10 or
| | 00:29 | just select it here and this
brings up Automatic Tracking.
| | 00:33 | Now there's a number of options that we
can do. The first one is to say what's
| | 00:38 | called Delete Soft Tracks.
| | 00:39 | Now we'll get into those little bit later, but
I am going to go ahead and keep that clicked.
| | 00:43 | We can also Automatic 2D
Tracking, which is what we want to do.
| | 00:46 | Let's go ahead over here to
Settings and let's take a look at these.
| | 00:51 | We can track using Grayscale or Color.
Let's go ahead and leave it on Grayscale.
| | 00:56 | We can also set a Min Track Length.
| | 00:59 | Typically, this defaults to 10,
but you can also make it higher.
| | 01:03 | What the Track Length is is how long will a
tracker point before it forgets about it?
| | 01:08 | So, the point has be stable for at least 10
frames in order for MatchMover to pick it up.
| | 01:15 | For longer sequences, this may create a
lot of points, which is not really what
| | 01:20 | we want, so I am actually going to
bring this up a little bit. I am going to
| | 01:23 | bring it up to about 40.
| | 01:24 | If we want, we can also set the
Sensitivity and the Density, so if we bring up a
| | 01:30 | higher Sensitivity, you can notice
how more points are going to be tracked.
| | 01:34 | If we bring it down, it's going to
be less sensitive and it's only going
| | 01:37 | to track a few points.
| | 01:40 | So again, this will give you more or
less points. The more points means the
| | 01:44 | better, more accurate it's going to be, but
also the more stuff it has to take care of.
| | 01:49 | So really what you want to do here is
you want to get the best balance between
| | 01:52 | the minimum number of points needed to
accurately track it versus having a lot
| | 01:57 | of points that you have to deal
with, and you really don't want that.
| | 02:00 | Then also the Density, how
dense do you want these points?
| | 02:04 | Typically, for myself, I tend to turn these
down rather than turn them up because I
| | 02:08 | don't like a lot of
superfluous data in my solution.
| | 02:11 | But again, this is going to be scene-by-
scene dependent, so it just depends on
| | 02:16 | what the scene is like,
| | 02:17 | then also Displacement Range, so 13
versus 128 pixels. This means how far does a
| | 02:23 | pixel have to move before
it will start tracking it?
| | 02:26 | The higher resolution your footage,
the higher these numbers can be and also
| | 02:30 | with MatchMover, you do want to get
as high a resolution footage as possible
| | 02:34 | because that's going to
create a more accurate track.
| | 02:37 | So with all that in mind, we also want
to do what's called Solve For Camera and
| | 02:41 | once we have all this, you can just hit Run.
| | 02:44 | Now this is going to take a little
bit of time and what it's going to do is
| | 02:50 | it's going to go ahead and find all
the points it thinks are stable and it's
| | 02:55 | going to track them.
| | 02:57 | Once it's tracked all the points, it
will then solve for the main camera, which
| | 03:03 | means it will go ahead and figure out
where the camera was compared to all of
| | 03:07 | these different points.
| | 03:09 | Now, this may take a while, so be patient.
| | 03:13 | Okay, so now our track is done and if
we scrubb through this, you can see
| | 03:18 | how all of these points that I determined
were actually tracking objects in the scene.
| | 03:23 | So for example, this point here is
tracking the edge of that lamp. This point
| | 03:29 | here is tracking the top
of the building and so on.
| | 03:33 | You can see how it's got all of these
and they are all tracked to that footage.
| | 03:39 | If I go into 3D, you are going to get
all this stuff, but really what it does is
| | 03:44 | it actually puts a little cone here
and it actually shows us where it thinks
| | 03:50 | everything is in Perspective.
| | 03:53 | So each one of those cones is a point
and it has also calculated where those
| | 03:58 | points are in Perspective.
| | 04:01 | So once I have all of that, then I
pretty much have a track that I can use.
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| Exporting MatchMover data| 00:00 | At this point, we should have our
footage completely tracked, which means that
| | 00:04 | MatchMover has calculated the position
of these objects in the scene and used
| | 00:09 | them to determine the position of the camera.
| | 00:13 | So, remember, as we scroll through
that, what we've got here is MatchMover
| | 00:17 | tracking these points and using that
information to deduce where the camera was at.
| | 00:23 | We can export all of this data and use
it in a 3-D application, so we're going
| | 00:29 | to go with File>Export and we're
going to be able to export that to whatever
| | 00:34 | 3-D application we want.
| | 00:36 | We have several different file types.
| | 00:37 | We have everything from Softimage
to Maya, Cinema 4D, 3D Studio Max.
| | 00:44 | It can also export to FBX for any
application that isn't in this list, most
| | 00:49 | of them will support FBX, so you can
actually export to a wide variety of applications.
| | 00:55 | We're actually going to export to
Maya and we can export different types of
| | 00:59 | things. We can export the Camera, which
is why we went through this whole process
| | 01:03 | was to determine where the camera was,
so we usually want to export that.
| | 01:07 | We can also export 3-D points,
which are these points in the scene.
| | 01:12 | Now, a lot of times, I like to export
the stuff because it gives you a sense
| | 01:16 | of where everything was at in the
scene and it will help you to place
| | 01:20 | additional objects in the scene when
you go to do something like bring your
| | 01:25 | assets into this backing plate.
| | 01:28 | Now when you export 3-D points, you
can export only selected points or tracks
| | 01:34 | that match these criteria. Now we have
two types of tracks. One is hard track and
| | 01:39 | soft track. Hard tracks are ones that
you define. Soft tracks are the ones that
| | 01:44 | MatchMover defined, so this was an
automatic match, so all of our tracks are what are
| | 01:49 | called Soft Tracks and we can also
export according to what MatchMover thinks is
| | 01:55 | the quality of the track,
either good, fair or bad.
| | 01:58 | Now a lot of times we'll just click off
bad because we don't want any of the bad
| | 02:02 | tracks and keep the fair ones or the good ones.
| | 02:05 | What I like to do is I like to kind of
reduce this because a lot of times you
| | 02:08 | can get a lot of points in here, so if
you Click down to just the good points
| | 02:13 | that will eliminate a lot of
superfluous data when you get into Maya, and
| | 02:18 | then also we have some additional options.
Do we want to animate the camera or the scene?
| | 02:22 | Do we want to keep the camera still and
move the scene around or do we want to
| | 02:26 | keep the scene still and move the
camera around? Which one you want?
| | 02:29 | Typically, we're going go to animate
the camera because that's what's going to
| | 02:33 | match the actual situation that we have
when shooting the scene and then also we
| | 02:38 | can scale it, so if you want to scale
it up to match the scale of your scene.
| | 02:42 | So now all we have to do is give
it a name and I am going to call it
| | 02:46 | CityShot, and hit Save.
| | 02:48 | Now I'm going to go over to Maya.
| | 02:52 | Now that I am in Maya, this is Maya
2010, I'm going to go ahead and do Open
| | 02:56 | Scene and I'm going to go ahead and
find that file, called CityShot.ma.
| | 03:01 | Now it saves in Maya ASCII format and there it is.
| | 03:07 | And you can see what it's done is it's
created a camera called rzCamera1, which
| | 03:14 | is its standard naming scene and that
actually has a image plane mapped to it,
| | 03:20 | which is our backing plate.
| | 03:22 | If I want to, I can actually take a
look through my Camera view just by going
| | 03:26 | under Panels > Perspective > rzCamera1 and taking a look
at it. You can see now that I've got that.
| | 03:33 | Now if your Image Plane is not showing
up, just make sure you go Image Plane, here
| | 03:38 | and this is your image sequence.
| | 03:41 | If I want to, I can actually take a
look at this, change my Camera Settings and
| | 03:45 | turn on my Resolution Gate to make sure
that I've got this within my 1280 x 720 window.
| | 03:54 | Now what we have here is we've got all of
these locators are actually located in 3-D Space.
| | 04:00 | So when I take a look at this, say, for
example, if I go outside of this Camera
| | 04:04 | View into, say, Perspective window, you
can see that all of these little locators
| | 04:11 | are actually as close to where the
original objects are as Maya can see, so
| | 04:16 | for example, let's take a look at, say, one
of these ones here, like this one really
| | 04:20 | far away ,on the top of this building.
If I go into my Perspective View, you can
| | 04:26 | see that that particular one is way
off here in the distance, so you can use
| | 04:31 | these points to actually find points in
your scene when you want to bring other
| | 04:37 | assets into your scene.
| | 04:39 | So I'm going to go ahead and keep this
where it's at and we're going to go ahead
| | 04:42 | and work with this file a little
bit more and show you how to work with
| | 04:45 | MatchMover-derived data within Maya.
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| Importing MatchMover scenes into Maya| 00:00 | Now let's take a look at how Maya
organizes the data that it gets from
| | 00:06 | Matchmover and really, this
applies to any 3-D application.
| | 00:09 | You're going to have very similar
types of data come into Max or Cinema 4D or
| | 00:14 | whatever application you're using, so
I've loaded up my shot called CityShot.ma,
| | 00:20 | which is what I've exported from Matchmover.
| | 00:23 | As you can see, we've got a lot
of locators in this scene. In other
| | 00:28 | applications you may have what are called null
objects, but basically it's going to be the same.
| | 00:32 | So, we have our camera and notice how
the camera has keyframes on every single
| | 00:37 | track and you notice how you can
see how the camera itself is moving.
| | 00:42 | In fact if I get this over a little
bit, you can see, from the backing plane,
| | 00:46 | how that's all moving the camera and
the image plane are all moving at once and
| | 00:50 | that's basically the motion of the
camera in the scene, and notice how all of
| | 00:55 | these points are actually still, which
is really what we had in real life.
| | 00:59 | The scene was still and the camera was moving.
| | 01:02 | If we go into our Outliner, you can
see how this data is set up. We have the
| | 01:08 | camera here and then we also have
what's called the rzTrckerGroup, which are
| | 01:12 | basically all the points that it tracked.
| | 01:15 | If I expand this, you'll notice I have
all of the Auto_Tracks and you'll notice
| | 01:19 | we have several hundred of these, which
is what it needed to track the scene.
| | 01:26 | We really have a lot of data here and it's
data that we kind of want to organize.
| | 01:29 | The reason that you're actually
going to be tracking a scene like this is
| | 01:33 | usually to bring in 3-D Assets
to combine with this live action.
| | 01:39 | So let's go ahead and bring in some 3-D.
| | 01:42 | So I'm going to go ahead and close
this Outliner window. We're going to go to
| | 01:45 | File>Import and I have a file
out here with a robot in it.
| | 01:50 | It's called Robot_anim.mb and now if I import
that, you'll notice I get a robot scene here.
| | 01:58 | In fact, let's go ahead and take
a look at this in the Outliner.
| | 02:02 | You can see here, I have an object
here called Robot_MAST, which is my robot
| | 02:07 | and everything else. In fact, if I move
him off to the side, you can see this is
| | 02:10 | what I brought into the scene.
| | 02:13 | Now what I can do is I can use this to
actually place the robot in the scene.
| | 02:18 | So, I'm going to ahead and put him
here and I'm going to start looking
| | 02:22 | through the camera.
| | 02:23 | So I'm actually going to go to rzCamera1
and you can see here that this robot is
| | 02:27 | a little big, so I'm going to go ahead
and select that Master Node, scale him
| | 02:31 | down and I'm going to hit to the 5
key to shade and then just go ahead and
| | 02:38 | rotate him and move him into place here
and you can see also that he is actually
| | 02:46 | amongst all of these little locators.
| | 02:49 | So, you can actually see that, yeah, he's
kind of right there in the middle of the
| | 02:53 | street where there wasn't too much data.
| | 02:55 | It is actually tracking the curves and
the lights on the side of the street and
| | 02:59 | that's basically where the robot is.
| | 03:01 | So now, if I look, you can see here the
robot is actually moving amongst the scene.
| | 03:06 | Now the robot is already pre-animated,
so you can see how that's all working.
| | 03:11 | What comes in from Matchmover,
really is just location data and a camera.
| | 03:16 | We can combine that with objects in the
scene to actually match those objects to
| | 03:21 | the location that we've created.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with MatchMover scenes in Maya| 00:00 | So now I have saved out the data for
you. It's called CityShot_01 and this has
| | 00:06 | the scene data along with the robot.
| | 00:09 | Now we are going to go ahead and fine
tune this to make sure that the robot
| | 00:13 | matches the scene exactly.
| | 00:15 | Now the reason we need to do this is
that when Matchmover does automatic
| | 00:19 | matching, it doesn't have really any
indication as to what's up or down,
| | 00:23 | where the ground is.
| | 00:24 | It doesn't really know.
| | 00:25 | So, it just matches points and tries
to make it as accurate as possible.
| | 00:30 | But a lot of times what happens is
that it keeps the camera flat and it tilts
| | 00:34 | the world, so that the camera stays
flat but the world is actually tilted.
| | 00:38 | Now we have that a little
bit in this particular scene.
| | 00:42 | So, if I look at it from the side view,
it's probably the best way to see it,
| | 00:45 | you can see here, I've got my Z-axis here,
this flat line, which is supposed to be
| | 00:52 | the ground plane, or in most live
scenes you want that to be the ground plane,
| | 00:56 | because you really want to animate
along a flat plane, it makes it a lot easier
| | 01:01 | for constructing the scene.
| | 01:03 | But Matchmover has all of our ground
points starting up here, and if you notice,
| | 01:09 | as it goes to the right, they go below that line.
| | 01:12 | So what we've got is we have you
got a little bit of a skew here.
| | 01:15 | So, in another words, instead of tilting
the camera it's actually tilted the world.
| | 01:19 | So, we need to make sure that the world and
the camera match what we have with the robot.
| | 01:25 | So, we can do that in one of two ways.
| | 01:27 | We can tilt our camera in scene data to
match the robot, or we can tilt our robot
| | 01:34 | to match the camera data.
| | 01:35 | It's a lot easier to tilt the camera.
| | 01:37 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 01:39 | We are going to go into our Outliner
and you'll notice here we have our camera
| | 01:44 | and our TrackerGroup.
| | 01:45 | This is the data that we
really need to work with.
| | 01:48 | So I am going to go ahead and
Shift+Select both of those and then we are
| | 01:51 | just going to do Edit>Group or Ctrl+G.
Now what that does is it just puts both
| | 01:56 | of those into a group.
| | 01:58 | Now I can move that group independently
and keep all of this tracking data alone.
| | 02:04 | So what I'm going to do is just move the node
that's the group and match that to the scene.
| | 02:10 | So for example, if I tilt this, you can see
how I can tilt this to match the scene.
| | 02:15 | In fact, if I look through the camera,
you can see how when I tilt this, it's
| | 02:21 | literally, looks like it's
tilting the ground to match the camera.
| | 02:25 | In fact, let's go ahead and take
a look at this in the camera view.
| | 02:28 | So basically, what I'm doing is I'm
just tilting the actual camera, but it
| | 02:33 | looks like I'm actually tilting the robot to
match and that's basically what we're doing.
| | 02:38 | So let's go ahead in the side view and
just tilt that until it's pretty much flat.
| | 02:45 | In fact, we could also move that a
little bit, so that it's pretty much
| | 02:48 | along the ground plane.
| | 02:51 | You can get as accurate as you want
and there are other ways of getting
| | 02:54 | Matchmover to be more accurate, and
we'll cover those a little bit later.
| | 02:58 | But for automatic matching, this is
probably the easiest way to get things all aligned.
| | 03:04 | So as you can see, once we have this
aligned, you can see that the camera was
| | 03:07 | actually shooting up just a little
bit and now we've got everything inline.
| | 03:12 | So now you can see that the
robot really is in position.
| | 03:18 | Now once I have this, I really don't
need to see all of these different points.
| | 03:22 | So I am going to go back into my
Outliner, select my TrackerGroup and just go
| | 03:28 | Display>Hide Selection.
| | 03:30 | So now, all I have is the camera,
the robot and the Backing Plane.
| | 03:37 | And now you can see that my grid pretty
much matches the ground that I was shooting.
| | 03:42 | So now, my ground and my grid
are pretty much in the same place.
| | 03:46 | So now, I can move my robot around and I can be
confident that he will always be on the ground.
| | 03:54 | And this is great, because if I wanted
to I could also, for example, put in a
| | 03:57 | plane to catch shadows or do
something like that, so if I wanted to create a
| | 04:03 | ground plane and light him and
create shadows, I could do that.
| | 04:07 | So as you can see, once we have our
camera data matched to our scene, it makes it
| | 04:12 | very easy to put objects in the scene
and animate them and make it look like
| | 04:17 | they're actually part of the scene.
| | 04:19 | Now the second part of this is actually
getting the Rendering of your 3D objects
| | 04:24 | to match those of the scene and we
are going to go ahead and take a look at
| | 04:27 | those in our next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Basic rendering of MatchMover scenes| 00:00 | So at this point, we pretty
much have our scene matched.
| | 00:03 | We have the robot and he's walking along the
plane that represents the ground in the scene.
| | 00:11 | Now this is really just the first half
of a successful match because what we
| | 00:16 | need to do is not just match the
motion of the scene, we also have to match
| | 00:20 | the lighting, the shadows and we need
make sure that our 3-D object matches
| | 00:26 | our 2-D backing plate.
| | 00:29 | Now, we do that by trying to match the
shadows and lighting as close as possible.
| | 00:34 | The best way to do this is
to Render in multiple Passes.
| | 00:37 | So, you have the objects separate from
the shadow, separate from the background,
| | 00:41 | which we will do a little bit later on.
| | 00:44 | But right now, I am just going to
show you the quick and dirty method of
| | 00:47 | getting this to happen.
| | 00:49 | Now, what I've got is I have got the
robot and I've got the Ground Plane,
| | 00:54 | but I really don't have
any connection between those.
| | 00:57 | Let me show what I mean.
| | 00:58 | If I do a really quick Render of this,
you'll see that the Robot Renders pretty
| | 01:03 | well, but the lighting is a little bit different.
| | 01:06 | Now, I shot this in the morning,
so the light was directly behind me,
| | 01:11 | but I was also in the shadow of this
building, so we need to make sure we
| | 01:15 | take that into account.
| | 01:16 | And also, there is no
shadow underneath this Robot.
| | 01:20 | Notice how we have a shadow under
the motorcycle but not under the robot.
| | 01:24 | Now a shadow is probably one of the
biggest things you can do to connect
| | 01:27 | something like this to the background.
Shadows are really important in these cases.
| | 01:34 | So how do we do that? We do that with lighting.
| | 01:37 | So the first thing I need to do though
is create something to catch that shadow.
| | 01:42 | So, what I'm going to do is create a Plane.
| | 01:45 | So, I am going to go into Polygons and
just create a Polygonal Plane underneath
| | 01:50 | my robot, and make sure that it's big
enough so that the robot can walk over it.
| | 01:56 | Now, once I have that Plane, if I
were to Render it, you'll see that the
| | 02:01 | Plane just renders Gray.
| | 02:03 | But what I want to do is I want that
plane to show up with the same pixels
| | 02:08 | as what's behind it.
| | 02:09 | So in order to do that, I am going to use a
special Shader. It's called Use Background.
| | 02:15 | Now, if I go over to my Rendering Tab, I
can just Select the plane and click Use
| | 02:20 | Background or if I go into my
Rendering Tab, there, under Lighting/Shading,
| | 02:26 | I can assign a new material
that's called Use Background.
| | 02:29 | What this material does is it just
takes the Pixels that are behind the object
| | 02:35 | and use them for the color.
| | 02:36 | So, when I Render this now, I don't get a
Gray Plane. I just get the scene itself.
| | 02:42 | Now, we can use this plane to create
reflections or shadows, and in this case,
| | 02:49 | we really want to do Shadows.
| | 02:51 | So in order to set up Shadows,
I need to set up the lighting.
| | 02:55 | So let's go ahead and do that. When I
imported this Robot, two lights actually
| | 02:59 | came in with the Robot and so I just
need to go ahead and place those lights.
| | 03:04 | This first light here is called
Spotlight Two, and this is going to be the light
| | 03:09 | that's to the right of the Robot and above him.
| | 03:12 | Let's just go ahead and render this here.
| | 03:16 | You notice here, under the motorcycle,
the shadow is actually kind coming almost
| | 03:20 | directly above and maybe a little bit to
the right, so the light source seems to
| | 03:25 | be somewhere right around here.
| | 03:27 | So, we want to try and
duplicate that with this second light.
| | 03:31 | So, I am going to go ahead and take
this light, and make sure that it's above
| | 03:35 | the Robot, and pointing down.
| | 03:39 | And then I just need to turn on shadows.
| | 03:42 | So I am going to do into my Attribute
Editor for that particular light and
| | 03:47 | scroll down. We're on
a very tight screen here,
| | 03:50 | so you might not be able to see
everything, but we can set our shadow color here.
| | 03:55 | And in this case, I am just going to
use Depth Map Shadows and in order to get
| | 04:01 | the Shadow kind of blurry, I am
turn this Filter size up to about four.
| | 04:05 | I am going to go ahead and Render
and now you can see, I've got a Shadow
| | 04:10 | underneath the Robot, but you notice
also how the Shadow is kind of leading off
| | 04:15 | into everything else, so I need to make
that show more above the Robot rather
| | 04:19 | coming from the side, because you can
see how the Shadow is actually covering
| | 04:23 | the light post and part of a motorcycle
and all of that, so what we need to do it
| | 04:28 | to make this Shadow more of a Drop Shadow.
| | 04:30 | Now I am going to go back to this and
I'm going to bring it almost directly
| | 04:36 | above this Robot and then
let's take a look at what we got.
| | 04:41 | That's not bad, and then if we want,
we can also take this Shadow and maybe even
| | 04:45 | blur it a little bit more.
| | 04:47 | I am going to go ahead and take this
Filter Size and maybe even bring it up to
| | 04:50 | maybe six or seven, and then
let's see what happens now.
| | 04:54 | So that looks pretty good.
| | 04:57 | Now you can even see that right now,
this Robot looks even a little bit better
| | 05:01 | just with this Shadow and
this lighting the way that it is.
| | 05:05 | What we have, though, is we have a
very dark side on this Robot and in this
| | 05:09 | area, you notice how the light is
actually fairly flat and fairly even.
| | 05:13 | So what we need to do is kind of light
the robot from all sides, so it's not so
| | 05:18 | dark on this particular side.
| | 05:20 | So I have got another light in the
scene here and this is called spotlight one
| | 05:24 | and this would probably be our main light.
| | 05:26 | And if you notice here in our
Attribute Editor, we have got an intensity of
| | 05:32 | about 0.6, which is about right,
because this light here, again, about 0.6.
| | 05:38 | I don't have any fall off on the lights,
which means that if the lights add up to
| | 05:43 | one that's about even lighting, so
just about right, and notice how that's
| | 05:47 | pretty good except it still feels a
little bit dark around the corners.
| | 05:53 | Now, we can fix this just by adding
what's called an Ambient Light to the scene,
| | 05:57 | so I can either select an Ambient
light here, from our tab, or I can do
| | 06:01 | Create > Lights > Ambient light, and it doesn't
really matter where the Ambient Light is
| | 06:08 | in the scene, because really,
it's just Ambient Lighting.
| | 06:13 | Now if I leave the intensity at one you are
going to see something that's way over exposed.
| | 06:19 | And what we can do is just turn this down
and this would kind of be our General exposure.
| | 06:24 | So I am going to turn it down to about
0.25, somewhere in that range, and you can
| | 06:31 | see now, this is pretty good.
| | 06:33 | Once I have all of this Rendering done,
then I can go ahead and just Render out a
| | 06:38 | scene and I can be done with it.
| | 06:40 | Now if I want to get a little bit more
complex, I can set up what are called
| | 06:44 | Render layers and Render it out in
Multiple layers and use a Compositor, such
| | 06:49 | as Toxik, to really fine-tune
this and make it really pop.
| | 06:54 | But those are some of the basics of
how to Render for a Match Move scene, and
| | 06:59 | once you have this basic knowledge,
you can go ahead and start using this to
| | 07:03 | actually start Rendering
scenes with your own footage.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Advanced MatchMoverWorking with the Full interface| 00:00 | Up until this point, we've been working
with the light interface of MatchMover
| | 00:05 | and that's really nice for automatic
matching, but if you want to get more
| | 00:09 | specific as to which points you
want to match or have more control over
| | 00:14 | MatchMover, then you
need to use the Full Interface.
| | 00:17 | I have a scene that's already been
matched and let's just take a look at the
| | 00:20 | interface against this scene.
| | 00:22 | So, I'm going to go ahead and pull up
the Full Interface by clicking on this
| | 00:27 | pulldown box here and notice how we
get a lot more control over the interface.
| | 00:32 | We still have our browser here,
which has all of our objects in the scene
| | 00:37 | including our tracking points.
| | 00:39 | Now below this, we actually have a window,
which allows us to see exactly what is
| | 00:45 | being tracked on any individual point.
| | 00:48 | So, I can click on a point here and
you can see exactly where that's tracked
| | 00:52 | or if wanted to click on it in the scene, so for
example, I click on this one at the light post,
| | 00:57 | you can see that that's the target as to
where it's going to try and track this.
| | 01:02 | So if I click here, you can see it's set
to the corner of this building and so on.
| | 01:07 | So as I scrub through this, you can
also see how it will also update as to what
| | 01:12 | it's trying to track.
| | 01:14 | Along the bottom here, I also
have all of my tracks on a Timeline.
| | 01:20 | So, these are actually the keys that
MatchMover generates when tracking this
| | 01:25 | point to the 2D scene. So, for example,
Track 01 has this Timeline and if you
| | 01:33 | notice here, each one is either
green, yellow or sometimes red.
| | 01:37 | If it's green, that means
it's a really accurate track.
| | 01:40 | If it's yellow, it's kind of medium.
| | 01:43 | If it's red, well, then it's
what's called the bad track.
| | 01:46 | So, we got these for every
single track in the scene.
| | 01:50 | We can also view these in different ways.
| | 01:53 | The default is what's called the Track View.
| | 01:56 | We also have a Graph Editor, which
allows us to actually see them on the
| | 02:00 | Timeline as well as Track Status, which
shows, again, a graphical representation of
| | 02:06 | these. I typically work with Track
View and just work with the colors.
| | 02:10 | Now over here to the right, we have
information on each individual track.
| | 02:16 | So, if I, for example, click on
Track 01, you can see all the information
| | 02:21 | related to that tracking point.
| | 02:23 | So, we have the label of the track.
If I wanted to, I can change the name of
| | 02:27 | that to say Lamp or something like
that and it will actually change it.
| | 02:33 | We can tell whether it's a hard track,
whether you're going to use this to
| | 02:37 | solve for 3D and whether you want to just
reconstructed in 3D, so when we export to Maya.
| | 02:42 | Now down here, we have
information about the track.
| | 02:46 | We have the 2D information, which is
how it tracks to the image and this is
| | 02:52 | actually our X and Y components of that
image, so where it is at any given point
| | 02:57 | in time on that Bitmap.
| | 03:00 | Now we also have a 3D representation,
which is once we solve for camera, this is
| | 03:06 | where it thinks it is in 3D space.
| | 03:09 | So the 2D is matched to the image and
the 3D is what MatchMover derives as what
| | 03:15 | it thinks the 3D information is.
| | 03:17 | At this point, you can do stuff
like import what's called survey info.
| | 03:21 | So, if you actually have accurate
measurements of a scene, you can import this here.
| | 03:26 | You can say this is exactly 10 feet
from the origin, or something like that.
| | 03:31 | So all of these go together to
help create a more accurate track.
| | 03:35 | So, we're going to go through, in the
next couple of lessons, and actually use
| | 03:38 | this interface to track some footage.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding tracks manually| 00:00 | Now let's take a look at how to add
your own tracking points into MatchMover.
| | 00:06 | I'm going to load a sequence here.
| | 00:09 | It's in our Chap02 folder and it's
called Pier_Shot and actually the file
| | 00:17 | name is called DSC_031.
| | 00:18 | I'm going to go ahead and open that up,
and you'll notice here we've got just a
| | 00:23 | shot of the Santa Monica pier
and we've got some good information.
| | 00:28 | Now if we wanted to, we can just
automatically track this, but if you want to be
| | 00:32 | more specific, we can actually
add in our own manual tracking data.
| | 00:37 | And sometimes this can help a lot
because you can actually track specific objects,
| | 00:42 | or specific points of objects, in a
scene and get those into 3D, which makes for
| | 00:47 | a more accurate sort of tracking.
| | 00:49 | If you do automatic tracking, you are
kind of at the mercy of MatchMover as to what
| | 00:53 | it decides is important and this
allows you to decide what's important.
| | 00:58 | We add tracking points
through the 2D Tracking menu.
| | 01:02 | We have an option here called New Track
and all we have to do is click on that
| | 01:08 | and it brings up a little crosshair
cursor here and what we can do is just
| | 01:13 | position this over where we want on the scene.
| | 01:16 | Now notice here in this window how this
is actually kind of tracking the cursor,
| | 01:20 | which gives us kind of like a zoomed
in version of what we're looking at.
| | 01:24 | So typically, you want to do this in
that full interface. And once we get our
| | 01:29 | tracking point exactly where we want it,
all we have to do is just left-click
| | 01:33 | and it lays it down and now we've got a
track here and we can actually work with
| | 01:39 | it here for if we want or we can
have MatchMover do the tracking.
| | 01:43 | So typically, the process is you
lay down your track and then you have
| | 01:47 | MatchMover track it in 2D.
| | 01:51 | We do that by just doing Track Forward,
or hitting F3, and you get very good at
| | 01:57 | using F3 in MatchMover because
typically what you do is you lay down your track
| | 02:02 | and then hit F3 and it automatically
goes through and calculates exactly where
| | 02:07 | that point is in 2D space.
| | 02:10 | So, as you can see, it's tracking
the path of that through 2D space.
| | 02:16 | So let's go ahead and do that one more time.
| | 02:20 | New Track and let's just pick another
position here, let's say the middle of
| | 02:25 | this of this light bulb here, on this
streetlight, click on that and then all you
| | 02:30 | have to do is hit F3 and MatchMover
goes through and calculates those.
| | 02:36 | But if we want, we can use this in
combination with Automatic Tracking, or
| | 02:42 | anything else, or we can
completely manually track a scene.
| | 02:46 | In order to manually track a scene,
you need at least seven points for
| | 02:50 | MatchMover to get enough
information to calculate the camera.
| | 02:53 | So, I'm going to go through and
actually add in a number of points so we can
| | 02:57 | actually solve for a camera.
| | 03:00 | So let's go ahead and add in a lot more points.
| | 03:03 | Now one thing I want to do is go
ahead and define the ground plane.
| | 03:07 | So I'm actually going to find the
highlight on this trashcan. Where it
| | 03:11 | intersects with the ground is a really
nice edge and so if we get that bottom
| | 03:15 | edge, we'll know that we have our ground plane,
| | 03:18 | so I'm going to go ahead and track
that. So I know that that particular point,
| | 03:22 | Track03, is on the ground.
| | 03:27 | We can do the same over here and again,
what I'm trying to do is kind of define
| | 03:32 | out these ground planes, so maybe
the bottom of one of these posts.
| | 03:35 | Let's see if that will track and
again, what we're looking for here is we
| | 03:44 | are looking for green.
| | 03:46 | So if we get a lot of green tracks, it
means it's actually really good and this
| | 03:48 | is actually a really good
track, so let's just keep going.
| | 03:52 | When you're looking for places to track,
you want to find places that have a lot
| | 03:56 | of contrast and are also stable.
| | 03:59 | So, for example, the top corner of this
building is great because it has a lot
| | 04:02 | of contrast between itself and
the sky and it's also stable.
| | 04:07 | Also, if we want to, we can use this
to create, if I want it to match, for
| | 04:12 | example, the top of that building I can do it.
| | 04:14 | Another one, in a similar vein,
would be maybe the corner of this wall.
| | 04:19 | Again, you can see here in the zoomed
in version of it that we have a really
| | 04:23 | nice edge between the dark and the white
and so again, this should track fairly well.
| | 04:29 | Now there are parts of this
scene that may or may not track well.
| | 04:36 | We actually have stuffs that's
moving and also one thing you have to be
| | 04:40 | careful of is you don't want to track
things like, for example, the highlight on
| | 04:45 | this actually moves in relation,
because it's really generated by the sun,
| | 04:50 | which is behind the camera.
| | 04:51 | It's actually going to move as the camera moves.
| | 04:54 | So you don't want to track a highlight
but you can't track, for example, the painted
| | 04:58 | details on this poll, or something like that.
| | 05:00 | If I wanted to, I could track that
little corner there on that and that would
| | 05:06 | actually track fairly well.
| | 05:07 | One of the things we're trying to do
when we track is we're trying to get stuff
| | 05:14 | that's close to the camera and far away.
| | 05:16 | So we want to really try and get a
lot of variation, so we wanted stuff
| | 05:20 | that's far away and close because what
it does is it gives MatchMover a lot more
| | 05:28 | information about the depth and
the construction of the scene.
| | 05:33 | The more variety of tracks we
get, the better off we're going to be.
| | 05:39 | So, this is the basic
process of laying down tracks.
| | 05:42 | Now what tracks are, again, is just
information in 2D space that will be used to
| | 05:47 | derive a 3D solution.
| | 05:49 | So, now that we have these in place,
the next step would be to solve for the
| | 05:53 | camera, which we will do in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Solving for camera| 00:00 | So, once you have all of your manual
points entered, you still need to calculate
| | 00:05 | the 3D information in the scene.
| | 00:08 | So far, we've only tracked the data in
2D, so all of these points are matching
| | 00:16 | the pixels in the image.
| | 00:19 | Now we need to take these and derive a
camera from these, as well as the depth
| | 00:23 | information in the scene.
We do that in the 3D Tracking menu.
| | 00:29 | Now we've been playing with the 2D
Tracking menu, which is, again, the bitmap.
| | 00:32 | Now we are actually going to derive
our 3D information using that 3D Tracking
| | 00:37 | menu, and we do this by
Solving For Camera, or F9.
| | 00:43 | So, once we do that, it will go ahead
and calculate where the camera is, based
| | 00:48 | upon all of these points.
| | 00:50 | One of the other things it's going to
do is it's going to rank the points.
| | 00:54 | It's going to give them green for a
really good track, yellow for medium, and
| | 01:01 | red for a bad track.
| | 01:03 | So most of these are green.
| | 01:05 | It looks like we've got a lot of green tracks.
| | 01:07 | It looks pretty good.
| | 01:10 | If we want to, we can take a look at this in 3D.
| | 01:13 | If we look at this in 3D, we can use
our Rotate tool to see where all of our
| | 01:18 | data is, and it looks pretty darn good.
| | 01:22 | If I want to see exactly what the
camera sees, we have to use what is called
| | 01:26 | Lock On Camera, or the shortcut is C.
So once you Lock On Camera, it will
| | 01:33 | actually view through the camera that
it's calculated, and show you exactly
| | 01:38 | where all those 3D points are,
and those look pretty darn good.
| | 01:43 | So now all we have to do is Export this,
and again, we can select which tracks
| | 01:48 | we are exporting, and I am just going to
call this Pier_01.ma, and it's going to
| | 01:53 | save it as a .ma, or Maya (ASCII
file), and once that's saved out,
| | 01:58 | I can go into Maya, Open
the Scene, and it should work.
| | 02:05 | So let's go ahead and look through our
camera and there it is, looks pretty good.
| | 02:11 | Now one the things is when you
manually track a scene, again, we're going to
| | 02:16 | have some of that problem that we had
before in that our ground plane may be a
| | 02:21 | little bit skewed or whatever, and we
can just use those same techniques to put
| | 02:26 | everything back to normal.
| | 02:27 | If we want, we can tilt the
camera or move the objects.
| | 02:30 | I am actually going to put this sphere
in the scene, maybe scale that down just
| | 02:35 | a little bit, and let's just
take a look at what that looks like.
| | 02:41 | So as you can see, we've
got this pretty much matched.
| | 02:45 | So, the process for manually matching
is to first lay in your tracks, and then
| | 02:51 | track them to the 2D image, then in
the next phase, you Solve For Camera, and
| | 02:57 | then you can export and import
into the 3D package that you want.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Object-based tracking| 00:00 | MatchMover can also use 3D
objects to help match a scene.
| | 00:05 | Let me show you how this works.
| | 00:07 | I am going to go ahead and Load a
Sequence, so we're going to go ahead, Load
| | 00:10 | Sequence and it's in our Chapter 2 folder.
It's called Bldg_Shot_0000.jpg and this is
| | 00:17 | really just a building, photographed from
a high perspective. The camera really
| | 00:23 | isn't moving too much.
| | 00:25 | The goal of the scene is to actually
put something in this parking lot and
| | 00:29 | then have it match.
| | 00:30 | So, I actually want to match this building.
| | 00:32 | Now MatchMover does have a 3D mode.
| | 00:35 | If I click here to go into 3D mode,
you can see I can actually view the scene
| | 00:41 | in 3D and because it's a 3D scene, I can
actually bring 3D objects into the scene as well.
| | 00:49 | I actually have, under 3D scene, an
option which allows me to put basic 3D
| | 00:54 | Primitives into a scenes.
| | 00:56 | So for example, if I brought a Cube
into the scene, I could actually have a 3D
| | 01:00 | Cube, which I could use
for matching or whatever.
| | 01:02 | You can notice how it comes in and it's
kind of like this, almost like a semi
| | 01:07 | transparent object. I am going to Delete that
| | 01:10 | because what I really want to do is
bring in an object that matches the building.
| | 01:16 | What I did was I went into Maya,
| | 01:17 | in fact, let's just bring this up very
quickly, and I did a very simple model of
| | 01:24 | the building and the way I did that
was I actually used a satellite photo and
| | 01:30 | some images from Google Street View to get
a rough idea as to what that building is.
| | 01:35 | I didn't have access to the building to
actually tape measure it, so my model is
| | 01:39 | probably 90% accurate. It's not 100%.
| | 01:43 | Now with any Match Moving the more
accurate measurements you get, the better
| | 01:46 | your solution is going to be.
| | 01:49 | So, knowing that this is pretty close
but not perfect, let's go ahead and bring
| | 01:53 | this into MatchMover.
| | 01:55 | So I am going to go
ahead and go Import. I am
| | 01:58 | going to import this object.
| | 02:00 | Now MatchMover only supports OBJ files.
| | 02:04 | It will support what's called REAL VIZ,
but for actual models, it only supports OBJ.
| | 02:10 | So export as OBJ and Open it up in MatchMover.
| | 02:14 | Now if you look closely, you can pretty
much see that there is the model that we want.
| | 02:19 | Now what I need to do is position this
so I can see the model and the backing
| | 02:23 | plate in the same image.
| | 02:25 | So what I'm going to do here is truck
in a little bit so my model is a little
| | 02:30 | bit bigger and I can
also see the whole building.
| | 02:34 | So you can see now I've got the model
here and the building, and so we should
| | 02:38 | be able to match that.
| | 02:40 | Typically, if I wanted to manually match,
all I would have to do is just go to 2D
| | 02:43 | Tracking>New Track and drop in some
tracking points, but I want to match these
| | 02:49 | points to my building.
| | 02:52 | So what I'm going to do here is just
Click on the corner of this model, drag to
| | 02:58 | the corresponding point in the image,
so I want to get the back corner of this
| | 03:04 | building and let go.
| | 03:05 | So now, I've got a connection between this
point on the model and that point on the building.
| | 03:11 | Then all I have to do is work my way
through the building. Because I'm laying in
| | 03:17 | points, I do want to solve
each one of these for the camera.
| | 03:21 | So I want to make sure that I hit F3
after each of these and make sure that I
| | 03:27 | track each one of these.
| | 03:28 | So, I am going to go back
and track my first point here.
| | 03:32 | So this is very similar to laying in
our tracking coordinates manually, like we
| | 03:39 | did in the last few lessons.
| | 03:41 | So again, I am going to get the bottom
right-hand corner of this building and
| | 03:44 | then I am just going to work my way around.
| | 03:51 | Go ahead and get this inside corner
and again, I want to make sure I get this
| | 03:56 | as accurate as I can because what we're
trying to do is match this to the exact model.
| | 04:03 | It's not like just I am laying in
points and saying, "Okay. Well, yeah, that's kind
| | 04:06 | of close," we want to make sure that this
is as accurate as we can make it, so be
| | 04:11 | very careful when you click in these points.
| | 04:15 | So now, I've got this back portion of the
building. Let's go ahead and get the front portion.
| | 04:18 | I am going to go ahead
and match this front corner.
| | 04:20 | Again we're matching the front of the
building, not the inside of that clip, and
| | 04:26 | again, I am going to click on this corner,
get this one and then all we have to do
| | 04:32 | is the bottom front.
| | 04:33 | Now make sure that you click as far
forward as you can because there's actually
| | 04:37 | two vertices here. We don't
want to get the inside one.
| | 04:40 | We want to get the one that's exactly
in the front and then we are going to
| | 04:43 | match that to the point where the brick,
notice here how the brick facia here
| | 04:48 | hits the sidewalk. Right there is where
we want to match this particular point.
| | 04:54 | Let's do this again for the opposite corner.
| | 04:59 | So now that I have these, you notice I
have a bunch of tracks and I am looking
| | 05:03 | at the colors and they
are actually, mostly green.
| | 05:05 | So actually, I have some pretty good tracks.
| | 05:07 | Now all I have to do is Solve For
Camera just like it did before. All I have to
| | 05:11 | do is either go 3D Tracking>Solve For
Camera, or just hit F9, and now it's gone
| | 05:19 | ahead and solved for my camera.
| | 05:21 | But I'm not looking through the camera
right now, so in order to do that, again,
| | 05:25 | I just have the hit C or
View>LockOnCamera, just the C key will do it.
| | 05:31 | Now if you notice, I've got it very much tracked.
| | 05:35 | So now, I have my virtual
building tracked to my image.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing object tracks into Maya| 00:00 | So now, our scene is totally matched.
| | 00:02 | In fact, I've saved this out to a file
called BldgShot.mmf and you can see how
| | 00:08 | we have the building pretty
much matched to the scene.
| | 00:13 | So, I can go ahead and export this
and bring it into the 3D App of choice.
| | 00:19 | So I am going to go File>Export and I
am just going to call this Bldg_01 and
| | 00:27 | I'll make sure I export the Cameras and I
don't want to export just the Selected Points.
| | 00:32 | I want to make sure I export all of the tracks
and make sure everything else is set up, that we are
| | 00:37 | actually animating camera and not the scene.
| | 00:40 | And then just go Save, and
we're saving to Maya ASCII.
| | 00:43 | Again, we can save out to any 3D format we want.
| | 00:46 | And I am just going to hop
over to Maya and bring it in.
| | 00:51 | So bring in Bldg_01.ma, Open. There it is.
| | 00:55 | Let's go ahead and look through
the camera and see what we have.
| | 00:58 | Now what MatchMover has done is it's
exported the tracking data, but did
| | 01:03 | not export the model.
| | 01:05 | You're going to have to bring the model back in.
| | 01:08 | So in order to bring the model
back in, I just have to import it.
| | 01:12 | So go Import and again it's an obj file,
so Building.obj, Import, and there it is.
| | 01:19 | Now, because MatchMover used this as a
reference, everything is in line and so
| | 01:26 | we have a pretty nice match.
| | 01:28 | We don't have to do any messing
around with it in order to get it nice and
| | 01:32 | square, because it is.
| | 01:34 | If you notice this building here is
exactly rectangular. It's exactly on the
| | 01:39 | ground plane and makes it very
easy to match this in a scene.
| | 01:44 | So let's go ahead and
actually add in a little bit more.
| | 01:47 | Let's go ahead and drop in a plane for that
parking lot that we've been wanting to use.
| | 01:53 | Now, if you notice here we've
got this parking lot, but oops!
| | 01:57 | I have a little bit of a problem here.
| | 01:58 | I have got -- looks like it's kind
of cutting off and that's just because
| | 02:02 | MatchMover set the clipping plane of
the camera. And this is something that may
| | 02:06 | come up is that you make things
that disappear and those are usually
| | 02:10 | clipping plane problem.
| | 02:11 | So it says, anything before
four units away, don't look at.
| | 02:15 | Well, I want to look at everything
that's close to the camera, so I am just
| | 02:18 | going to make that a very low number and
you can see how that pops right in, and
| | 02:21 | you can do the same on the other side,
which is your far clipping plane.
| | 02:25 | But again, we have everything matched.
| | 02:28 | If I wanted to, I could
actually bring in my object.
| | 02:32 | Let's say, I wanted to bring that
robot in again, so I am going to Import
| | 02:36 | and let's just import Robot_anim.mb
and we'll Import that, and wow. He comes
| | 02:44 | in little bit too big. There he is.
| | 02:47 | In fact, I am going to
actually do a little trick here.
| | 02:49 | I am going to take a look at my Image Plane.
| | 02:51 | Go into my Image Plane Attributes,
and I only want to look at this through
| | 02:56 | the camera and not in all views, and that
way I get a little bit of a better view here.
| | 03:01 | And you can see he's actually really
big in comparison to this building.
| | 03:04 | So, I am just going to go ahead and
scale him down, and rotate him and kind of
| | 03:15 | place him in the parking lot.
He is still a little bit too big,
| | 03:17 | but let's go ahead and
just make him the right size.
| | 03:21 | And again, this can be really any sort
of object or animation that you want.
| | 03:25 | So again, I am just using the Robot
as an example, and there you have it.
| | 03:29 | So now, I've got a completely matched scene.
| | 03:32 | I've got the Robot scaled properly to
the building and I also have the building
| | 03:37 | in the scene, so I can actually use
it to do things such as cast and accept
| | 03:41 | shadows in the scene, as well as for
any sort of special effects I want to use.
| | 03:47 | So, as you can see, using a model
that's accurately measured can really help
| | 03:53 | you with MatchMover.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering with layers| 00:00 | As with the previous project, all we have at
this point is a robot matched to the scene.
| | 00:06 | We have the motion matched, but we don't have
him looking like he's actually in the scene.
| | 00:11 | For that, we need to do some rendering tricks.
| | 00:14 | For this particular scene, we're
going to render it very similar to the way
| | 00:18 | we rendered it in the last chapter, but
we're going to use what's called Render layers.
| | 00:22 | And this will give us more control
once the render is done, and it'll allow
| | 00:26 | us to composite this robot back into the
original plates and have a lot more control.
| | 00:32 | Now this is the way they normally do it
in high-end Studios, because you really
| | 00:36 | want to finish shots like this in a compositor.
| | 00:41 | Let's go ahead and do a quick render.
| | 00:45 | So as you can see, I've got the robot,
I've got the lighting set up and I also
| | 00:50 | have some shadows that cast along
this ground plane and the building.
| | 00:54 | I don't have any textures on either,
so we need to make sure we set up the
| | 00:58 | texturing for that as well as get
the robot separate from the background.
| | 01:02 | So, what we're going to do is create two layers.
| | 01:04 | One for the robot and one for just the shadow.
| | 01:08 | And then when we go into compositor,
then we can a little bit more control over
| | 01:13 | color and contrast and that sort of thing.
| | 01:16 | So, I am going to go ahead and close this.
| | 01:17 | And let's go ahead and start working with this.
| | 01:20 | So first thing I need to
do is set up the Shadow layer.
| | 01:23 | So, what I am going to do here is
actually create what's called a layer.
| | 01:28 | In our Channel box, if I click here,
you'll see we have basically our Channel
| | 01:33 | box, which is all of our Translate,
Rotate and Scale, but at the bottom we have
| | 01:37 | our Layers menu here.
| | 01:40 | And the Layer menu I want to look
at right now is the Render layers.
| | 01:43 | So, we have our Display layers, which
allows us to turn objects on and off,
| | 01:47 | but Render layers allows us to create
multiple passes when Maya goes to Render.
| | 01:55 | And it actually is very simple to use,
so let me show you how this works.
| | 01:58 | First thing I want to do
is set up a Shadow layer.
| | 02:01 | I need to figure out exactly
what's involved in creating that shadow.
| | 02:06 | Well, of course, I need something to
receive the shadow, so I need the building
| | 02:10 | in the ground plane and then I also need
something to cast the shadow, so I need
| | 02:14 | the robot and I also need the lights
to get that lighting into the scene.
| | 02:20 | So basically, I need everything.
| | 02:22 | So I am just going to go Edit>Select All,
and that just selects everything in the scene.
| | 02:28 | Then I am going to go to my Layers menu,
and just go Create layer from Selected.
| | 02:33 | And that creates a Render layer.
| | 02:37 | I can double-click on that
and just type the word 'Shadow.'
| | 02:40 | So, this is going to be my Shadow layer.
| | 02:43 | Now if I just render this, you'll see that
it's pretty much the same as we had before,
| | 02:48 | because I haven't done any changes to it.
| | 02:51 | So, what I need to do is make the
robot disappear, because I don't want this
| | 02:56 | image in the Shadow layer. I want the
shadow just to be there and whatever
| | 03:01 | it's being cast upon.
| | 03:03 | So let's go ahead and work with the
building and the ground plane first and
| | 03:07 | those we'll pretty much do the same way
we did the last time is we'll select
| | 03:10 | both of these and we'll apply
what's called the Use Background Shader.
| | 03:17 | So we can go here. We can just go
Assign New Material > Use Background, and you
| | 03:22 | can see that turns green.
| | 03:24 | And I just want to make sure I turn
my Reflection Limit down, because these
| | 03:27 | are not reflective.
| | 03:28 | And then let's go back over here to
our Channel Box and make sure we have our
| | 03:32 | Shadow layer highlighted and do a quick render.
| | 03:36 | And you could see now that by adding
that Use Background Shader, it's gone ahead
| | 03:41 | and sucked up the pixels from the backing plate.
| | 03:44 | So now we've got that part done, but we
still need to make the robot disappear.
| | 03:49 | And we could do that, very
simply, by selecting the robot.
| | 03:52 | So, I am going to go into my Outliner
and here I have a node called Robot Master.
| | 03:58 | So I am going to go ahead and select
that and I am going to apply a new material
| | 04:04 | to him. I'm actually just
going to apply a Lambert Material.
| | 04:07 | It can really be any type of material,
but Lamberts are simple because they
| | 04:11 | are not reflective.
| | 04:12 | And then I am just going to turn
the Transparency all the way up.
| | 04:18 | What I am doing here is I am actually
using a little trick of the way that the
| | 04:23 | Maya Renderer works.
| | 04:25 | In the Maya Renderer, Depth-map
shadows don't work with Transparency, which
| | 04:30 | means a transparent object
will still cast the shadow.
| | 04:33 | And we can use this to our better effect here.
| | 04:36 | So let's just go ahead and just render that.
| | 04:38 | And you could see now the robot has
disappeared, but he is still casting a
| | 04:43 | shadow, which is great.
| | 04:45 | So, now I have just the shadow.
| | 04:47 | So now, I am going to go back to my
masterlayer and let's go ahead and render
| | 04:51 | that and see what we have.
| | 04:52 | And my masterlayer is
basically what I had before.
| | 04:56 | And the reason I did this was to
show you that I've actually got two
| | 05:00 | different types of layers.
| | 05:02 | And just by activating that layer and
changing the render parameters, Maya will
| | 05:07 | remember those and then when you go to
render, it will just go ahead and apply
| | 05:11 | those to that layer, and render
out every layer that you have.
| | 05:15 | So, what I am going to do here is
go back to my masterlayer, go into my
| | 05:21 | Outliner, select my Robot, plus
there are two spotlights in the scene.
| | 05:27 | So I am going to select the Robot and
the lights that are illuminating the
| | 05:31 | robot, and then all I am going to do here is
just do Create another layer from Selected.
| | 05:36 | So now I have another layer, and
notice how when I click on this, there is
| | 05:41 | nothing but the robot.
| | 05:42 | So I'm just going to double-click on
that, change it to Robot, and now I've got
| | 05:51 | my masterlayer, which is
everything, and that's not going to render.
| | 05:54 | I can actually turn it on or off here.
| | 05:56 | But what I want to render is the
Shadow layer, which does this, and the Robot
| | 06:06 | layer, which does this.
| | 06:08 | It's just the robot.
| | 06:10 | Now, the one thing I still have is I
still have this image plane behind the robot.
| | 06:15 | I need to delete that before I
actually go to render, because I really want
| | 06:20 | to render this against black so that
way, I have a very clean plate when I
| | 06:24 | got to composite it.
| | 06:25 | So, I need to get rid of my image plane.
| | 06:27 | So, what I'll need to do here is just
select my Camera and the way that I do this,
| | 06:32 | there's a number of ways of doing it,
but I just go into my Hypergraph,
| | 06:37 | once I have my Camera selected and
typically attached to the camera is the image
| | 06:41 | plane, and all you have to do
is highlight that and delete it.
| | 06:44 | And once I do that, when I go to render,
now I have the robot against black.
| | 06:51 | Once I have this set up, I
can go ahead and do my render.
| | 06:55 | And what will happen is when it goes
to render, it will create directories
| | 06:59 | within your project file called Robot
and Shadow and it will actually fill
| | 07:05 | those with the renders.
| | 07:07 | So if I go into View Image and I go
into my project here, you can see, under
| | 07:12 | images, I have a couple of directories here.
| | 07:15 | I have one for the Robot and one for the Shadow.
| | 07:19 | So, these were created when I rendered.
| | 07:21 | So, when I select this, I have just my
robot against the black background, which
| | 07:27 | I can use in compositing.
| | 07:28 | So those are some of the tips for using
Render layers to get more sophisticated
| | 07:33 | renders, so that you can composite.
| | 07:35 | So now once we're done with this, let's
go ahead and go into BackBurner, which is
| | 07:40 | going to be our network rendering
where we can do a lot of this rendering and
| | 07:43 | then we'll move on to Toxik and
composite it all back together.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. BackburnerIntro to Backburner network rendering| 00:01 | So now we are going to take a look at
Backburner, which is network rendering for
| | 00:05 | Maya, as well as for 3ds Max and Toxik.
| | 00:09 | So, this actually applies to a
number of different Autodesk applications.
| | 00:13 | We are going to look at this from the
Maya standpoint, but you can use these
| | 00:17 | techniques on the other Autodesk packages.
| | 00:20 | Now Backburner consists
of three separate programs.
| | 00:25 | These programs are Manager, Monitor and Server.
| | 00:31 | Now let me explain what each of these does.
| | 00:35 | Manager really is the core of Backburner,
and it's the program that assigns the
| | 00:40 | frames to the server.
| | 00:41 | So, it manages the whole process.
| | 00:44 | Server is the one that
actually renders the frames.
| | 00:48 | So Manager tells server to render say
frame 20. Server will go ahead and launch
| | 00:54 | Maya, and render that frame.
| | 00:57 | When it's done, it will tell Manager that,
"I need another frame," and the process repeats.
| | 01:04 | Now Monitor is actually your
interface into this process.
| | 01:10 | You can actually run all of Backburner
just using Manager and Server, but if
| | 01:14 | you want to take a look at what's
going on, Monitor is your interactive
| | 01:17 | management and scheduling.
| | 01:19 | It allows you to turn Servers on or
off, reprioritize things, and so on.
| | 01:25 | It's really kind of your
interface into that whole process.
| | 01:28 | Now let's take a look at how this all is set up.
| | 01:32 | We have two types of computers.
| | 01:35 | We have one manager in the whole network,
and then we can have multiple servers.
| | 01:42 | Now the manager computer will be
obviously running the manager program, but it
| | 01:47 | can also act as a server.
| | 01:50 | So that means you can actually network
render within a machine, which is kind of
| | 01:54 | nice, because you set up a bunch of jobs
and send them out and have your machine
| | 01:58 | render them overnight without
having to have multiple machines.
| | 02:01 | And the manager machine can also run Monitor,
which allows you to look at the process.
| | 02:07 | Now the Server machines are
not allowed to run Manager.
| | 02:10 | You only have one manager program
running, and then you can have as many server
| | 02:14 | programs running as you want, and you
can also run Monitor on any machine you
| | 02:20 | want to look at the whole process.
| | 02:22 | Now of course, any of these machines
that are running Server also need to have a
| | 02:27 | copy of Maya or Max or whatever
installed, so that you can have the rendering
| | 02:33 | program on the machine, so
that the whole process will work.
| | 02:37 | So, in addition to this,
we also need one more thing.
| | 02:40 | We need a common place to store all of our data.
| | 02:43 | Because we have multiple computers, we
need a common network location where we
| | 02:50 | are going to render to.
| | 02:51 | So we need one shared folder that all
of these computers can read and write to,
| | 02:56 | to actually do the network rendering
process, because when the server is done
| | 03:00 | rendering a frame, it needs to
save that out in a common location.
| | 03:04 | So, the whole process works by the
Manager accepting the job from the user, and
| | 03:10 | then it decides which frames go to
which server, and it sends out those jobs to
| | 03:15 | each individual server.
| | 03:17 | The server launches Maya, renders
the frame, and when the frame is done,
| | 03:23 | everything is written to that shared folder.
| | 03:26 | So, that's the basic overview of the
rendering process using Backburner.
| | 03:32 | So let's go ahead and get into the
actual nitty-gritty of using Backburner.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up Manager and Server| 00:01 | So starting up network rendering
in Backburner is fairly simple.
| | 00:05 | We need to start up the Manager first.
| | 00:08 | So the first thing we do is we go to
our Backburner folder either through
| | 00:12 | our Start menu, but I've actually
dragged it to the Desktop here, and you'll
| | 00:16 | see three programs.
| | 00:17 | One is called Manager.
| | 00:18 | One is called Monitor.
| | 00:19 | One is called Server.
| | 00:21 | All I have to do is double-click
on Manager and I have started it.
| | 00:25 | Now Manager really is a very simple
program. I am going to minimize this here.
| | 00:30 | It basically just gives you
information about the rendering process.
| | 00:34 | Now when you first start it up, it will
bring you into this General Settings menu.
| | 00:40 | Now this is just the very
first time you launch it.
| | 00:43 | Now you can always go back to this
menu if you want to change things.
| | 00:46 | Now typically, I just leave it at default, but
there are a number of options we can work with.
| | 00:53 | One is to determine which
TCP/IP port we want to use.
| | 00:57 | Now typically, we want to set this to
default, but if your network has special
| | 01:01 | requirements, you can work around this.
| | 01:04 | We also have an option that says what to
do when a Server fails, just general
| | 01:08 | things as to how many concurrent
assignments we can apply to a server, maximum
| | 01:13 | servers per job, those sorts of things.
| | 01:16 | There is also a Mail Server, so if
renders fail, it can actually email you that
| | 01:21 | said, "Well, I am having problems,"
which is great if you have a giant render
| | 01:25 | farm, and you have a lot of
time critical things going on.
| | 01:29 | We also have what's called a Jobs Path,
which is where we want our jobs to be located.
| | 01:36 | Now again, this used to be a central location.
| | 01:39 | Now we have either a Win32
path or a Windows path or a UNIX path.
| | 01:43 | It depends on how you have your servers
set up, and you can just browse for that.
| | 01:49 | Also, we have what's
called Default Job Handling.
| | 01:52 | Whenever Backburner gets a job, it
saves out a file with all the information
| | 01:57 | needed to recreate that job.
| | 02:00 | So when the job is completed, do you
want to just do nothing and leave that file
| | 02:05 | on your hard disk? Do you want to
delete it or do you want to delete it after a
| | 02:09 | specific number of days,
or we can also archive it?
| | 02:13 | Now I am going to leave these all at
the defaults, and I am just going to
| | 02:16 | go ahead and hit OK.
| | 02:18 | Now at this point, I don't have anything
going on, because I don't have any servers.
| | 02:24 | The Manager itself is really just
looking for servers to send jobs to.
| | 02:29 | So, if I want to actually start up
something, I can go back into my Backburner
| | 02:34 | menu, and start up a Server.
| | 02:36 | So all I have to do is double-click on
this, and now I have a server program going.
| | 02:42 | So, now I have enough to
actually start rendering.
| | 02:45 | Now notice here on the Backburner
Manager what happened is it says, "Successful
| | 02:49 | registration from," and this is the
name of the machine, booth-06-pc.
| | 02:55 | And this, in the Server menu
it says, "Registration Accepted."
| | 03:00 | Now it's actually using the IP
address of the machine, but it's the same.
| | 03:04 | Now I have a second machine on the
network, and I am going to go ahead and
| | 03:09 | launch server on that right now, and
let's take a look at what happens in
| | 03:14 | the Backburner Manager.
| | 03:16 | So now, I have launched it, and it has gone
ahead, and now I have my second machine on.
| | 03:22 | So now, I actually have
two machines on the network.
| | 03:25 | Now I just launched Server, but there
is actually a configuration menu for
| | 03:29 | Server as well, and let me
show you what that looks like.
| | 03:33 | This is a lot simpler.
| | 03:34 | Basically, it just says what's the
name of the computer that Server is
| | 03:38 | running on, so basically what's the
name of this computer? And also, what's
| | 03:42 | the name of the Manager?
| | 03:44 | Now you have two options here. One is
to actually type in the name, or you can
| | 03:49 | click what's called Automatic Search,
and what Automatic Search does is it
| | 03:53 | basically goes from 0 to 255 on your
network and it just checks every possible
| | 03:58 | location of a computer, and once
it finds a Manager it connects it.
| | 04:03 | So, this is actually kind of the
default method, and actually, I kind of like
| | 04:06 | using it this way, because it's
almost the failsafe method, because it will
| | 04:11 | eventually find the Manager.
| | 04:12 | It may be a little bit
slower to start up, but it works.
| | 04:15 | So really all you have is the name
of this computer, and the name of your
| | 04:18 | Manager, or if you don't really know
it, just search for the first Manager.
| | 04:23 | And if you do a change like this, it
won't take affect until the next time
| | 04:27 | you restart the server.
| | 04:30 | So once, I have both of these programs
running and connected with no errors, I
| | 04:34 | am ready to submit jobs to the render farm.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Configuring network paths| 00:01 | So, now that we have the Manager and
the Server running, we can basically just
| | 00:05 | minimize these, because these will
basically run as background processes.
| | 00:10 | Now the next thing we need to do is set
up a master network location, a shared
| | 00:15 | folder where all the servers can
write to, and we just do that through
| | 00:19 | standard network techniques.
| | 00:21 | Now I am going to set this up on
Windows, but if you have a separate server,
| | 00:25 | just make sure that all of your
machines are connected to this one server.
| | 00:29 | Now how I'm going to do this is I
am actually just going to go into my
| | 00:33 | Exercise Files on my desktop,
and we are in Chapter 3.
| | 00:37 | Now what I've done is I have actually
created a folder called Backburner Share.
| | 00:43 | Now this can be any folder on any
disk and any directory on your machine.
| | 00:47 | It can also be a separate server,
and really, what I want to do here is I
| | 00:51 | want to create a share.
| | 00:53 | So, I am going to go right-click and
go down to Properties, and under this
| | 00:57 | Properties, we have Sharing.
| | 01:00 | Now in order to do this, you do need to
be the administrator on your computer,
| | 01:04 | but once we have those
privileges, we can share this.
| | 01:08 | So all we have to do is just hit the
Share button, and make sure that this is
| | 01:12 | shared to yourself, as well as everyone.
| | 01:16 | And we want to make sure that
everybody has Read/Write permissions to it.
| | 01:19 | So we just pull this menu down and we say,
"I want to share to everyone," add that
| | 01:25 | in, and then make sure the permissions
are Read/Write, because you really need
| | 01:29 | to be able write those frames back
once you've rendered them, or else you are
| | 01:32 | going to start getting errors.
| | 01:34 | Now once we do that, we hit Share, and
we hit Done, and then we just close this.
| | 01:41 | So now, this is shared.
| | 01:42 | Now within this folder is where I am
going to put all my assets. In fact, in
| | 01:47 | this, I actually have a project file
called Robot Project, and that's just a
| | 01:52 | standard Maya project file.
| | 01:54 | So, I have my scenes in here, and then I'll
have an images directory for our final renders.
| | 02:01 | Now once we do that, once we have all
of this set up, we need to make sure that,
| | 02:07 | within Maya, that we put everything into
this network path, and the best way to do
| | 02:12 | that is to use Projects.
| | 02:14 | So, I am just going to go ahead and go
into Maya, and now once I am in Maya,
| | 02:19 | I just need to set my
project to that network folder.
| | 02:24 | Now here, I could actually set it to my
desktop, and within my desktop actually
| | 02:30 | go into Exercise Files and find that,
| | 02:34 | but if I go through it this way,
you'll notice that the path starts with my C
| | 02:39 | drive, which is not a network drive.
| | 02:41 | This will not be able to be seen by
any of the other machines on the network.
| | 02:45 | So, this is not how I want to set my project.
| | 02:47 | So I am going to go ahead and get rid
of that, and I am actually going to go to
| | 02:51 | Network, and I am going to find my PC,
find me and find that network shared,
| | 02:59 | under Exercise Files/Chapter 3/Backburner Share.
| | 03:03 | Once I have that, you'll see that when
I go into my project settings, let's
| | 03:09 | just do Edit Current,
| | 03:11 | you will notice that it
doesn't start with a C or D drive.
| | 03:14 | It starts with a double backslash,
and that means it's a network path.
| | 03:19 | Once I have that set, then all I have
to do is just work in that project and
| | 03:25 | everything should network render to it.
| | 03:28 | So let's just make sure that our
project is set up with a network path, and
| | 03:32 | everything else should fall into place.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Sending jobs to Backburner from Maya| 00:01 | Now once we have our project set to a
network path, we can go ahead and load our
| | 00:06 | scenes and render as much as we want.
| | 00:08 | So, let's go ahead just open a scene.
| | 00:11 | Now notice how when I actually open a
scene and my project is set, it already
| | 00:15 | goes to this network path,
which is really important.
| | 00:19 | And so, I just want to go ahead and
open up Bldg_Shot03, and just open it up,
| | 00:25 | and no, I don't want to
save, and there is my shot.
| | 00:28 | I already have my render layers already set up,
and so everything is pretty much ready to go.
| | 00:33 | Now all I have to do is basically just render.
| | 00:36 | So, in Maya, we now have a new option on
the Render menu called Create Backburner Job.
| | 00:42 | Let's go ahead and go into that, and
it says "Before I create my Backburner
| | 00:47 | Job, do we want to save?"
| | 00:48 | Well, I just loaded it, so I don't
need to save, so I am just going to hit
| | 00:50 | Ignore, and it brings up
a really nice menu here.
| | 00:54 | Now, we can give this a job name, which is
basically that file that gets saved on the disc.
| | 00:59 | If you want, I can give it a description.
| | 01:02 | We have a priority, so 50 is in the
middle. 100 is the biggest number.
| | 01:09 | 1 is the lowest number.
| | 01:11 | So, typically everything gets
submitted at 50. Everything will just render
| | 01:17 | in order received, but if you have a high-
priority job, just give it a bigger number.
| | 01:21 | And then you want to say what
Renderer do you want to use. You can actually
| | 01:24 | force it to render with a specific renderer.
| | 01:27 | You also have additional options.
These will be command-line options, so if you
| | 01:31 | want to force specific features on to
the renderer, you can add them here.
| | 01:36 | Now, this is where we actually make
sure that we have the right manager name,
| | 01:40 | and then after completion what do you want to do?
Do you want to delete the job, or whatever.
| | 01:45 | And then also we can create log file.
| | 01:47 | If a frame doesn't get rendered,
it will write it to that file.
| | 01:50 | Now here is actually a really
important one, because this actually can create
| | 01:55 | an error if you have 64-bit Maya, which
is actually what we have, because what
| | 02:01 | happens is that, with 64-bit Maya, you have a
64-bit Maya, but Backburner is still 32-bit.
| | 02:09 | So, what happens is that it's
looking for Backburner here.
| | 02:14 | This is where it finds Maya, and
this is where it finds Backburner.
| | 02:18 | But Backburner is a 32-bit
application, which means it's in the other
| | 02:23 | Program Files directory.
| | 02:25 | So, if you get an error, let
me show you how to fix this.
| | 02:27 | I am going to hit the dots here,
and we are going to go to our C drive.
| | 02:31 | We have two Program Files directories here.
| | 02:34 | This is for 64-bit, and the one
that says x86, that's for 32-bit.
| | 02:40 | So, this is where you'll find Backburner.
| | 02:41 | So, you go in Autodesk, under
Backburner, and then you want to find this one
| | 02:46 | called cmdjob.exe and you
can see the difference here.
| | 02:52 | This is Program Files.
| | 02:53 | This is Program Files (x86).
| | 02:56 | That will allow Backburner to run.
| | 02:58 | So, if you run into a
problem, that's where it is.
| | 03:00 | And then once we are done, we can
actually have it send an email, when it's
| | 03:04 | done, or we don't have to.
| | 03:06 | And then we can submit the
job and close the window.
| | 03:09 | Now when we do that, I am going to
minimize this, and let's go ahead into
| | 03:14 | Backburner and take a look at
what happens in the Manager.
| | 03:17 | You can see here it says it's
sending instructions to each one of these
| | 03:22 | machines, and now as they
render it will go ahead and render.
| | 03:27 | And if I take a look at the Server,
you can see that the server is actually
| | 03:31 | going through the files and starting to render.
| | 03:35 | So, those are the basics of
sending a job from Maya to Backburner.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing network renders with Monitor| 00:00 | Once you've submitted your job from
Maya, you can take a look at its progress
| | 00:05 | using the Monitor applications.
| | 00:07 | So, let's go ahead and open that up.
| | 00:09 | And what we need to do, in Monitor, is
connect to the specific manager we want.
| | 00:13 | So, I am just going to go ahead and go
Connect, and then type in the name of the
| | 00:17 | Manager, or do automatic search if there's
only one manager on the network, and hit OK.
| | 00:23 | And then any jobs that have been
submitted to the Manager show up.
| | 00:27 | So, the jobs that are proceeding
normally show up in green. If there's any
| | 00:31 | errors, you'll see it show up as red.
| | 00:33 | If you click on it, you can see
all sorts of details about the job.
| | 00:37 | You could see a Job Summary, how
many frames that sort of thing.
| | 00:42 | Task Summary, which frames are waiting.
| | 00:45 | Details about the job.
| | 00:47 | If there are any Errors,
those will show up here.
| | 00:50 | Along the bottom, we have a panel
here that shows all of our servers.
| | 00:54 | So, in this case, I only have two, but
it also shows whether the servers are
| | 00:58 | Busy, whether they're Idle and
also show if there's an Error.
| | 01:02 | So basically, a Busy server is green,
anything that has an Error will be red,
| | 01:07 | and Idle servers will show up in yellow.
| | 01:10 | And from this point, we can also right-
click over any job, and we can edit the
| | 01:15 | settings for the job.
| | 01:16 | So for example, if I click here, I can
actually see all the settings for the job
| | 01:20 | and edit them if I want.
| | 01:21 | I can also change the priority of
the job, if I want this to go faster.
| | 01:26 | I can clone the job.
| | 01:27 | I can create a report.
| | 01:29 | I can also do things such as
suspend or restart the job.
| | 01:33 | And of course, I can delete a job
if I want to just get rid of it.
| | 01:37 | Now, also we have a menu along the top here.
| | 01:40 | This allows us to connect
or disconnect to the Manager.
| | 01:44 | We can also Auto-Connect.
| | 01:46 | If it loses a connection to the
Manager, we can reconnect back to it.
| | 01:49 | We can also basically go through a lot
of the same options that we have just by
| | 01:54 | right-clicking over jobs or servers,
and then also we can turn off things, such
| | 01:59 | as viewing the Status bar or the toolbar.
| | 02:03 | And those are really just
the basic functions of Monitor.
| | 02:06 | And what this does is it really just
allows us to Manage, re-prioritize jobs,
| | 02:10 | and just see the general
progress of our rendering.
| | 02:14 | Now just remember that this is not
the actual Manager. This is just an
| | 02:18 | interface into the Manager.
| | 02:21 | You need to make sure that Manager is
running, in order for all of this to work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Troubleshooting| 00:01 | Now when you're rendering with
BackBurner, of course you're going to
| | 00:03 | have network issues.
| | 00:04 | It's kind of almost part of the game
is that when you have a bunch machines
| | 00:08 | working together, one machine or
all the machines aren't going to work.
| | 00:12 | So, I'm just going to give you
a few quick things to check when
| | 00:16 | troubleshooting BackBurner.
| | 00:18 | Now if you get into really
sophisticated things, you are probably going to
| | 00:21 | need somebody who knows a little
bit about networking and configuring
| | 00:24 | computers and all of that, but these
are just some basic things to check for
| | 00:28 | the average person.
| | 00:30 | Now the first thing you want to do is
make sure your network is completely
| | 00:33 | connected, so you want to make sure that
all the machines can see each other, so
| | 00:37 | go on each machine and make sure that
you can connect to every other machine.
| | 00:42 | If you want to, go ahead and even ping the
machines using the ping command from a command line.
| | 00:48 | Another one is to make sure that all
the files/textures and assets are network
| | 00:54 | visible, so again, make sure that
everything is in a project and make sure
| | 00:58 | that that project is pathed with
network paths. If anything is like listed as
| | 01:04 | being on a C Drive or a D Drive, it's
not going to be visible to everything,
| | 01:08 | so go through your whole project.
Make sure everything in that project can be
| | 01:12 | seen by the network.
| | 01:14 | And then, finally, make sure you check
your network Read/Write permissions.
| | 01:17 | You could very easily have shared a folder,
but made it Read-only, so make sure that
| | 01:22 | your entire network can
write to that common folder.
| | 01:26 | Now also, you want to make sure that
you check software, so make sure that you
| | 01:31 | have the exact same
version of Maya and BackBurner.
| | 01:34 | So, if you've done an incremental update
of Maya, you want to make sure that you
| | 01:38 | have that on every single machine,
that you have the same version of all the
| | 01:42 | software on all the machines.
| | 01:44 | Also, it helps to have the same version
of the operating system, although that's
| | 01:48 | not as critical, but that can help as well.
| | 01:52 | And also make sure that your software is
licensed on the appropriate machine, so
| | 01:56 | the machine that's sending the
renderer job has to be licensed.
| | 02:00 | And also make sure that any plug-ins
that you're using are installed on all the
| | 02:04 | appropriate machines.
| | 02:06 | So, if you have a special rendering plug-in
or a meshed affirmation plug-in or
| | 02:10 | even a script or something like that,
you've got to make sure that all the machines
| | 02:14 | have that same script, so that
they can render the same scene.
| | 02:18 | And finally, here are some
additional things to check.
| | 02:21 | You want to make sure that machine
names start with a letter and not a number.
| | 02:26 | Now that's kind of an obscure thing,
but that can kill a network render.
| | 02:30 | Also make sure that you've installed
full versions of Maya on each machine.
| | 02:35 | Don't do a pick-and-choose instal of Maya.
Just go ahead and use the disk space,
| | 02:39 | install the whole version of Maya.
It'll save you a lot of hassle.
| | 02:43 | Now there will be cases where you have
some machines that are 32-bit operating
| | 02:47 | systems, and some that are
64-bit operating systems.
| | 02:51 | If you have that mixed environment,
make sure to run Manager on the 32-bit
| | 02:57 | machine, okay? Because it's a 32-bit
application, it seems to work better in
| | 03:02 | that respect. And finally, debug your
network one connection at a time, just get
| | 03:08 | Manager and Server working within one
machine, then add in a network machine,
| | 03:13 | make sure that that works
and then continue to add machines.
| | 03:17 | If you try to debug the entire network
at a time, you're just going to create
| | 03:21 | headaches for yourself, so refine the
problem, knock it down to just a very
| | 03:25 | simple case, make sure that
works and then build from there.
| | 03:30 | And if none of those things work, just
remember that Google is your friend, so
| | 03:35 | if you type your problem into Google,
there's a good chance that somebody else
| | 03:38 | will have had that problem,
and have posted a solution.
| | 03:42 | So network with your friends and other
people who have used Maya. They could
| | 03:46 | also offer up a solution.
| | 03:48 | Also, remember that BackBurner has been
a part of Max for quite a while, so if
| | 03:53 | you try to debug a Maya problem, a lot
of the Max problems that people have had
| | 03:58 | will also apply to Maya.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Basic ToxikToxik interface| 00:00 | Now we're going to take a look at the
last of the applications that now ship
| | 00:05 | with Maya 2010, and that's Toxik.
| | 00:08 | Toxik is a compositor, very similar to
After Effects or Shake, in that it allows
| | 00:14 | you to combine multiple
images into final output.
| | 00:17 | Now this works really well with Maya,
because it allows you to render in layers
| | 00:23 | and then bring everything back together,
and just fine tune it in the compositor
| | 00:27 | before doing final output.
| | 00:29 | So, Toxik also can be used as just
a general image processor as well.
| | 00:35 | Now before we get started in Toxik, let
me just show you some of the basics of
| | 00:39 | the Toxik interface.
| | 00:40 | First, you'll notice that Toxik
uses a lot of its own conventions.
| | 00:44 | It's not quite like a Windows app, so
you'll notice that you can't resize the
| | 00:49 | window, and the menus look a little bit
different, but once you get past these
| | 00:54 | differences, you'll find
it's fairly easy to work with.
| | 00:57 | Now Toxik is a node-based compositor,
so most of the menu options are actually
| | 01:03 | attached to the nodes that it uses, so
along the top here, we only have a File >
| | 01:08 | Edit and then a small Scripts menu.
| | 01:10 | There's really not a whole lot
along the top menu. Most of your options
| | 01:14 | are within the nodes.
| | 01:16 | Now Toxik has a couple of different
window types. The first is Viewport.
| | 01:19 | So for example, the robot that
we're seeing is in a Viewport.
| | 01:23 | We also have all of our compositing
nodes here, which are also in a Viewport.
| | 01:28 | So for example, here we have our
layout, which has our robot element, the
| | 01:34 | shadow, and then those two
comps together, so we have nodes.
| | 01:38 | You can actually just trace through the lines
here and see how it's all kind of wired together.
| | 01:44 | And then we have our backing plate
here, and then we've composited all that
| | 01:48 | together for final output.
| | 01:50 | Now notice when I actually click on
these, how this bottom set of menus
| | 01:54 | changes, so when I'm in output, I am actually
looking at the output options for this scene.
| | 02:00 | When I hit the one that says
Blend & Comp, then I get the controls for blending
| | 02:05 | and compositing two elements
together, and the same for the footage.
| | 02:09 | So this is actually the controls for
the footage, how long it is and so on.
| | 02:14 | So, in addition to our Viewports, we
have our Controls, which are down here.
| | 02:19 | So for example, if I clicked on this
footage here, I could actually work with
| | 02:24 | this and if I clicked with my
output, I could change that as well.
| | 02:28 | Now in between these we actually have
a Timeline, which allows us to scrub, we
| | 02:33 | have keyframing controls here, we can
turn this on and off to automatically
| | 02:37 | Keyframe or create Keyframes.
| | 02:39 | We have our Frame counter here.
| | 02:42 | We also have a Player.
| | 02:43 | Now one of the things with compositing
is that you really do need a fast hard
| | 02:48 | disk in order to play things in real-time.
| | 02:51 | So with this particular one, we've got a
lot of elements, so I'm not going to be
| | 02:54 | able of play this in real-time,
but let me show you how this work.
| | 02:56 | If you hit Play here, it will
actually start to play in Full Screen.
| | 03:01 | Now all I have to do is hit Esc, and
then I can see it in the smaller Viewport.
| | 03:07 | So, if I hit that, it goes big.
| | 03:09 | Hit Escape, it goes small.
| | 03:10 | I hit this one to Stop.
| | 03:11 | So this plays forward, this one plays
backwards, and this one is the Full Screen Player.
| | 03:21 | Now the rest of the interface is fairly simple.
| | 03:24 | Along the bottom here we have a
Status Bar, and actually one of the
| | 03:27 | nicest things is here we can click
this and pull down and figure out what
| | 03:31 | type of layout we want.
| | 03:32 | So, if we want something a little bit
different, we can just create whatever
| | 03:36 | type of layout we want.
| | 03:37 | Now I'm going to go ahead and put this
back to where it was, and also, down here,
| | 03:43 | we also have our Preferences.
| | 03:44 | So, if you click here, you
get your Project Preferences.
| | 03:47 | These are things related to the actual
file that we're working with, and these
| | 03:51 | are more global User Preferences.
| | 03:55 | So those are some of the basics of the
Toxik interface, and now let's go ahead
| | 04:00 | and get started in actually using Toxik.
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| Navigating Toxik| 00:00 | When you start using Toxik, one of the
things you'll learn is that there are a
| | 00:04 | lot of hidden functions that
exist under the mouse keys.
| | 00:08 | When you're using Toxik with the mouse,
you need to be sure to use a three
| | 00:12 | button mouse, because there are some
additional functions in that middle
| | 00:16 | click that you can use.
| | 00:18 | You can also use Toxik with a tablet or
pen, particularly if you're doing things
| | 00:22 | like painting mattes and that sort of thing.
| | 00:25 | But we are using it with the mouse, so
we're just going to keep it very simple here.
| | 00:28 | So the first thing you want to take
a look at is the right-click options.
| | 00:32 | Now these change,
depending upon where you're at.
| | 00:35 | So if I'm over, for example, a Layout
Window and I Right-click, you have these
| | 00:40 | options, and one of the ones you'll use
the most is called Add from Pick List.
| | 00:44 | Now these are basically the effects and
compositing functions that we can apply
| | 00:49 | to clips, so these are really just all
the things that we can do with the stuff
| | 00:53 | in our Layout Window.
| | 00:55 | We also have options to Layout
everything, which means just to clean up your
| | 00:59 | layout and so on and so forth,
Reset Zoom and Pan and so on.
| | 01:04 | Now, if you're over an Image Window or
Viewport that contains an image such as
| | 01:08 | this one, right-clicking
will give you different options.
| | 01:12 | Again, you can have Add from Pick List,
but some of them are Reset, Zoom and
| | 01:15 | Pan, View and Display.
| | 01:17 | So for example, if I only want to
display RGB, or if I want to display Alpha
| | 01:22 | Channel or just the Alpha
channel, I can do that sort of thing.
| | 01:25 | I can also do what's called a Comparisons.
I can actually compare two images together.
| | 01:31 | Comparison is great
if you're doing an effect,
| | 01:33 | and you want to see what it
looks like before and after.
| | 01:35 | You can select two nodes and do a comparison.
| | 01:38 | And then another one is Fit
to Player or Reset Zoom/Pan.
| | 01:41 | Now this will actually go to actual
pixels or this will shrink or expand to fit
| | 01:47 | the size of your window.
| | 01:50 | Now another menu option you want to
be aware of is called the Drop Gate.
| | 01:54 | Now again, this will change depending
upon where you're at in the interface, but
| | 01:59 | it's accessed by hitting middle click.
| | 02:02 | Now we're just going to do it over a
viewport here, and if I middle-click
| | 02:05 | here, you'll see that I have
options to go to Schematic, a Pick List,
| | 02:10 | Composition Browser and so on.
| | 02:12 | So, if I click again, it goes away.
| | 02:14 | So, it's almost like a gesture.
| | 02:15 | So, you can see if I move the mouse
quickly to the left or the right you will
| | 02:19 | see this window comes up and then it disappears.
| | 02:22 | So, this is actually very gestural.
| | 02:24 | So if I click here and go to Pick List,
this gives me a bigger version of that
| | 02:28 | pick list I can get through the right-
click, but I also can go through different
| | 02:32 | types of Views and once I move
off of that window, it disappears,
| | 02:36 | so I don't have to hit Close for anything.
| | 02:39 | So another one you would do probably
would be the Composition Browser, which is
| | 02:42 | basically all the assets in
our scene in the text format.
| | 02:46 | So again, you can scroll through these,
and as soon as I move my mouse off of
| | 02:49 | that, it disappears, and this actually
makes it much more productive because you
| | 02:53 | don't have to open and close windows.
| | 02:55 | You can just have that
window available when you want it.
| | 02:58 | Now the Drop Gate can be used for a
lot of different things and you will be
| | 03:02 | using it in various places in the
program, but I just wanted to introduce that
| | 03:05 | concept to you before we proceed.
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| Creating a composition| 00:00 | Now that we understand the basics of
getting around within Toxik, let's go ahead
| | 00:04 | and actually start
creating our own compositions.
| | 00:07 | We can do that by just doing File>
New, or Ctrl+N, and this brings up the
| | 00:12 | Create Composition window.
| | 00:14 | Now what this is basically just a
file browser that allows us to pick the
| | 00:19 | directory where we want to
save the composition file.
| | 00:22 | Now when you create a composition, it
actually saves out a file, which has all
| | 00:26 | of your scene data.
| | 00:27 | So, we need to actually scroll through this.
| | 00:30 | Now this is actually not a very
Windows or Mac friendly browser, but you get
| | 00:35 | the hang of it here.
| | 00:36 | So actually I'm going to go to my
Desktop and under Exercise Files here, I'm
| | 00:41 | actually going to double-click and go
into Chap04 and this is where I'm going
| | 00:45 | to create my composition, and I am
just going to call it Comp_01, and if we
| | 00:50 | want, we could actually type in the destination,
but it's actually better just to browse to it.
| | 00:55 | And then all we have to do is hit Create.
| | 00:57 | Now once we do that, it adds our first node
into our composition and that is the Output node.
| | 01:05 | Now this is basically the
output of our final project.
| | 01:08 | So, if we had a composition network that
kind of came in here, this is our final node.
| | 01:12 | This is where our final output is.
| | 01:14 | Now one of the things you need to be
aware of, in Toxik, is that we have two
| | 01:19 | places where you can set resolution.
| | 01:22 | If I go down here, you can see I
have my Composition resolution here.
| | 01:27 | I can pick my Format, or I can
type in the numbers manually.
| | 01:31 | So let's say I wanted
this to be high-definition.
| | 01:34 | So I hit the down arrow and find HD
720p, or I can also use the middle mouse
| | 01:41 | button to kind of roll up and down that list.
| | 01:43 | There is also a scroll
bar along the side as well.
| | 01:46 | So, I just want to go ahead and select 720p.
| | 01:50 | Now this is what I'm
working on in my composition.
| | 01:54 | So, this is everything that
comes up to this Output node.
| | 01:57 | So, if I wanted to, I could actually
work in a higher resolution and then output
| | 02:01 | at a lower resolution.
| | 02:03 | But what we want to do is actually just
output the same that we're compositing
| | 02:07 | at and typically, that's what you want to do.
| | 02:09 | So, you want to make sure your
composition is the same as your output.
| | 02:12 | So, if I click on this Output here or
on this tab here, I can, again, set this.
| | 02:18 | So, I am going to go ahead and make
sure that that's at 720p as well and then
| | 02:21 | I'm ready to actually start bringing in
footage and start building my composite.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing footage| 00:00 | Now that we have our basic composition
set up, we can actually start inputting
| | 00:04 | footage and start building our composition.
| | 00:07 | So in order to input footage, all you
have to do is just go to File > Import or
| | 00:11 | Ctrl+I and that brings you back to the
File browser and again, we are in under
| | 00:16 | Exercise Files, Chap04 and you will
notice there are three directories here:
| | 00:21 | City_Shot, Robot, and Shadow and
these are three elements that we are going
| | 00:25 | to composite together.
| | 00:26 | So right now, let's just start with the
backing play, which is called City_Shot.
| | 00:30 | So when I click on that, you will
notice it right here, there is a little node
| | 00:34 | that says JPEG and what
this is is a JPEG sequence.
| | 00:38 | Now footage in Toxic can
only be image sequences.
| | 00:42 | It's very similar to MatchMover in that regard.
| | 00:46 | You can not bring in QuickTime or AVI,
Flash. Any sort of movie file just won't
| | 00:51 | be able to be imported.
| | 00:52 | Toxic does support a wide array of
still image types, but you are working
| | 00:57 | with image sequences.
| | 00:59 | So this one is actually a JPEG sequence.
| | 01:02 | So if I looked at this in the Windows
browser, you would see 150 files named
| | 01:07 | City_Shot_00, City_Shot_01 and so on,
but Toxic is actually nice enough to say,
| | 01:12 | "This is actually an image sequence.
| | 01:14 | Let's just go ahead and combine that
into one menu item and let's just import it."
| | 01:18 | Now when you import this, I am going
to close this right here, you will see
| | 01:22 | now we have two nodes.
| | 01:23 | We have our footage node,
and we have our Output.
| | 01:27 | Now if I look at my footage node,
you will see I have image import.
| | 01:31 | You can see its type is JPEG,
resolution, image ratio, frame rate, also the
| | 01:37 | duration. This is 150 frames,
so I can scrub through it.
| | 01:42 | But right now, I can only scrub to
frame 24, because that's as many frames as I
| | 01:46 | have in my default composition.
| | 01:48 | So, I need to actually bring that up to
150 frames and now I can scrub through
| | 01:52 | my whole piece of footage there.
| | 01:55 | There are some additional options here.
| | 01:57 | We can actually change our
start and end frame if we want.
| | 02:00 | We can also change our frame rate if we need
to, but basically, this is our image import.
| | 02:05 | Now once we have this image here, we can
actually start working with it in Layout.
| | 02:11 | If you notice here, if I click on this piece of
footage here, it shows up in my viewport.
| | 02:16 | That's just the image sequence.
| | 02:18 | It's not what's going to be the final output.
| | 02:20 | That's determined by this node
and right now, that node is black.
| | 02:25 | There is nothing there.
| | 02:26 | That's because we haven't connected the
two together and this goes to the heart
| | 02:30 | of what node-based compositing is, is
that you have to wire one node to the other
| | 02:35 | in order to actually get a compositing network.
| | 02:38 | So let's go ahead and do this and
create one of the simplest composites we can
| | 02:41 | get, which is just an image being output.
| | 02:44 | So what I do is I just go here to
this little tab at the right-side of this
| | 02:49 | icon, left-click and drag, and you
will see I get a little wire that comes up
| | 02:53 | and all I have to do is plug that wire
into the back end of Output and now my
| | 02:58 | output is that image sequence.
| | 03:00 | Now, of course, this is just a very
simple composite, but what we can do is
| | 03:04 | we can expand on this.
| | 03:05 | We can actually run these wires
through nodes that composite images together
| | 03:09 | that do color correction, that do
special effects, and we can build a much more
| | 03:13 | sophisticated network.
| | 03:16 | So now, we have brought in footage
and actually wired it to the output.
| | 03:20 | Now we can go ahead and start
bringing in more footage and actually doing
| | 03:23 | some compositing.
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| Compositing footage| 00:00 | Now the real goal of any compositor is
to composite together multiple footage.
| | 00:05 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 00:07 | In order to do that, we
need to import some more footage.
| | 00:09 | So I am going to go to File > Import
and I am going to go back to my Chapter 04
| | 00:13 | folder, and we have two
additional folders here.
| | 00:16 | One is called Robot and one is called Shadow.
| | 00:18 | So let's go into Robot and there is
file here called Robot_City_, Import and
| | 00:24 | that's the one that we actually
rendered out of Maya and then let's go to the
| | 00:27 | Shadow director and we have another one.
Unfortunately, it's called Robot_City_.
| | 00:31 | This is something that Maya does when
it renders out in layers, so we kind of
| | 00:35 | have to be able to work with files like that
and this are actually both targa sequences.
| | 00:39 | So, now that I have these, you can see
that the first one is just the robot,
| | 00:44 | animating in his inimitable way,
and then we also have the shadow.
| | 00:50 | So basically, we have the robot,
the shadow and our backing plate.
| | 00:53 | So, this is a very typical composite.
| | 00:55 | So, the first thing I am going to do is
go ahead and arrange these in the order
| | 00:59 | that we want it to composite them.
| | 01:00 | I want the robot on top, the
shadow and then the backing plate.
| | 01:04 | Now this isn't important
in terms of how Toxic works.
| | 01:07 | It's just something that I like to do, so
I understand the order of the composite.
| | 01:11 | It's more of just an organizational thing.
| | 01:13 | So, the first thing I want to do is just
go ahead and create a composite between
| | 01:17 | the shadow and the backing plate.
| | 01:20 | Now I can do that by adding in a rendering note.
| | 01:23 | So I can right-click here, Add from
Pick List, or I can go here to what's called
| | 01:30 | the Pick List and these are all of
the effects and things that we can do.
| | 01:33 | So we have one here for
compositing called Blend & Comp.
| | 01:37 | Now typically, how I work is I just go
ahead and right-click over this and the
| | 01:41 | most recent one that you do will
actually come up here, but if it's not there,
| | 01:45 | just go Blend & Comp.
| | 01:49 | Now if I click off of this, you
can see that these tabs disappear.
| | 01:53 | When I click back on it,
you can see these appear.
| | 01:56 | These three tabs are the
controls for this particular node.
| | 01:59 | Now what I want to do is actually create a
comp between the shadow and the background.
| | 02:06 | First thing I am going to do is I am
going to take the output of the shadow and
| | 02:10 | I am going to plug it into one of these slots.
| | 02:12 | Now notice we have four slots on the
backside of this. Where output only had
| | 02:16 | one, this one has four.
| | 02:17 | So this first one, if you hover over
there, it will say that's your mask.
| | 02:21 | This is your Matte.
| | 02:22 | This is the Back plate,
and this is the Front plate.
| | 02:25 | Well we want the shadow in front, so
will put that in front and now we will need
| | 02:29 | to connect this to the back.
| | 02:32 | Now we can do that by disconnecting this.
| | 02:34 | So I can actually disconnect this by
holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on
| | 02:38 | that wire and then it disconnects it and it
ask me to replug it in wherever else I want.
| | 02:41 | So, Ctrl+Left Click disconnects it.
| | 02:44 | So when I click on this comp, you can
see now I have got my shadow right here
| | 02:49 | and then if I want, I can actually take
the output of Blend & Comp, plug it into
| | 02:53 | my output, and now I have the shadow.
| | 02:56 | Now if I go to my Blend & Comp note, if
I highlight this and go here, you can see
| | 03:01 | I can actually change the gain. I can
change my front gain, my back gain. I can
| | 03:05 | do some color correction here.
| | 03:07 | Now if I wanted to make that shadow a
little bit lighter or darker, I can just
| | 03:11 | go ahead and adjust it here. All I am
doing this is left-clicking over this and
| | 03:14 | dragging left and right. That's all
I have do to adjust one of these.
| | 03:18 | I can also gain just a specific color and
you have a color wheel where you can do that.
| | 03:23 | You can also make the background
disappear if you want, but we don't really want
| | 03:27 | to do that and we also have our
compositing method, which is do you want to
| | 03:31 | composite it over, at top,
inside, outside and so on?
| | 03:34 | How do you want to blend it?
| | 03:36 | Do you want to add, subtract? These are a
lot like the Photoshop Blending modes,
| | 03:40 | when you go in the layers in Photoshop.
| | 03:41 | So you have your add, subtract, dark and
multiply and then, of course, do you want it
| | 03:46 | Superpose, Adjacent? Well, we
usually leave this at None.
| | 03:49 | So now, we have a Shadow.
| | 03:51 | Well we still need to
composite the robot over the shadow.
| | 03:54 | So, we need the robot on top of the
shadow and both of those on top of this.
| | 03:58 | So actually, I need to take this
and do the exact same thing here.
| | 04:02 | So, I will need to go ahead
and do one more Blend & Comp.
| | 04:04 | So I am right-clicking here, and just
selecting Blend & Comp, and I am going to
| | 04:09 | put the robot in front and then I
need to disconnect this, so again, we are
| | 04:14 | going to hit Ctrl, plug the shadow into
the black, and you could see here now I
| | 04:19 | have got the robot over the shadow and
then take that output and plug it into
| | 04:25 | the front of this one.
| | 04:27 | So now I have the robot composited with
the shadow and the robot and the shadow
| | 04:32 | composited with the
background and that all goes to output.
| | 04:36 | Now this is getting kind of messy here.
| | 04:38 | So if I right-click over this, I can
just say Layout All and then it will go
| | 04:42 | ahead and clean that up for me.
| | 04:44 | At this point, I can actually
start playing with my composition.
| | 04:48 | So, if I wanted to, for example, I
could make my shadow a little bit lighter.
| | 04:51 | I could change up whatever I want
and now, I have got my final output.
| | 04:57 | Now this might not scrub as fast
because we have a lot of targa files in here,
| | 05:00 | which actually might slow it down
if you don't have a fast hard disk.
| | 05:03 | But you can basically get the hint here.
| | 05:05 | Now we actually have the Robot
successfully composited into the scene.
| | 05:11 | Now this is just the basics of compositing.
| | 05:14 | If all you knew was this, you could
actually just composite together elements.
| | 05:17 | But you can also take this further by
adding effects and color correction and so on.
| | 05:22 | But these are the basics
of compositing in Toxic.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Advanced Toxik: Adding Effects and Correcting ColorCorrecting color| 00:00 | Now once you have your basic
composition set up, you can start adding in
| | 00:04 | color correction, effects and all
sorts of other techniques to make your
| | 00:09 | project really pop.
| | 00:10 | Let's go ahead and start off with some
color correction, and I'll show you how
| | 00:14 | to add in those nodes and work with them.
| | 00:17 | Now, we have four basic color
correction effects in Toxik.
| | 00:22 | Now if I click over here to my Pick
List, you can see, under color correction, we
| | 00:25 | have one called CC Basics, one called
Photo Lab, another one called CC Histo and
| | 00:31 | that's for histograms.
| | 00:33 | That's almost like a Levels type of
thing and then we also have Color Curves.
| | 00:37 | Now I am just going to deal with the
first one, which is CC Basics, which is
| | 00:40 | probably the most common one that you'll use.
| | 00:43 | Now in order to bring this in, all I
have to just left-click and drag this on.
| | 00:48 | And then I can basically connect this
into the network by disconnecting this one
| | 00:53 | and then wiring it through.
| | 00:54 | But let me show you an
easier way of doing that.
| | 00:57 | I am going to go ahead and
highlight this and delete it.
| | 00:59 | Now if I position my cursor over the
wire right-click, Add from Pick List,
| | 01:06 | and then all I have to do is find the
one that says CC Basics, or if I go under
| | 01:11 | color correction I can do it there,
but let's go ahead and do it here.
| | 01:13 | And if that one is highlighted,
it will automatically wire it in.
| | 01:18 | It makes it a lot easier, and this will
actually make things go a lot faster for you.
| | 01:22 | So now, I have the Robot wired through
some color correction before it actually
| | 01:27 | blends in with the shadow.
| | 01:29 | And after I go over here, I can
actually do my color correction.
| | 01:31 | Now if I want to see what the final
output is, so I can color correct him
| | 01:35 | against the background, I have to right-
click in this window and I want to view
| | 01:40 | Composition Output rather than
Tool Output, right here under Display.
| | 01:45 | So, that displays the final
output of what I'm working with.
| | 01:48 | So that way, when I do my Color
Correction, I can see him against the background,
| | 01:52 | to make sure that I'm getting the proper color.
| | 01:55 | Now this is actually a fairly
simple color correction. We have our Hue,
| | 01:59 | Saturation, Contrast.
| | 02:01 | We can also have a Gain, just an overall Gain.
| | 02:04 | We can also just pick on this color
wheel. Probably the easiest thing to do
| | 02:08 | is just drag on this color wheel
and you can see how we can tint it to
| | 02:12 | whatever color we want.
| | 02:13 | If I want to make him more blue, I can do that.
| | 02:16 | If I want to make him more
red, I can click it over here.
| | 02:20 | We can also work with Color Temperature.
| | 02:22 | So, I can actually gain up my temperature
to make them a little bit more saturated.
| | 02:27 | But actually, if I look at this
background this background, this
| | 02:29 | background isn't so saturated.
| | 02:30 | So, I might actually want to
desaturate him a little bit.
| | 02:33 | I can also play with things like Gamma.
| | 02:35 | So, if I want to change my
Gamma I can do it this way.
| | 02:38 | And if I go over here to Ranges, I
can actually make this affect the entire
| | 02:42 | image, just Shadows, just Midtones or Highlights.
| | 02:47 | So, you really do have a lot of control,
even with this basic color control.
| | 02:51 | Now the next one I want to
show you is called Photo Lab.
| | 02:54 | So, we are going to go ahead and drag this over.
| | 02:57 | Go over the line, highlight it, right-
click and under Pick List, I am actually
| | 03:01 | going to go down to color correction here,
and find Photo Lab and wire that one in.
| | 03:09 | So now, I have my Photo Lab on my backing plate.
| | 03:14 | So I've got my backing plate wired
through Photo Lab into Blend & Comp.
| | 03:18 | If I double-click on that, you can
going to actually go into Photo Lab here,
| | 03:21 | and you could see this is actually a very
different way of working with color correction.
| | 03:26 | It's really just a bunch of color
wheels for Exposure, Contrast and another
| | 03:31 | thing called Pivot and Lift.
| | 03:32 | For example, if, with this, if
I want to change my Exposure,
| | 03:36 | I can change it and tint it.
| | 03:38 | So for example, this plate is a little
bit dark - I am going to hit Reset here -
| | 03:41 | and if I just bring it up, you can see
I'm actually exposing it a little bit.
| | 03:47 | I can also make it more or less contrast-y.
| | 03:50 | So if I make a little less contrast-y,
| | 03:52 | you can see I can actually pump up
my gain a little bit more, so I have a
| | 03:56 | little bit more detail in these shadow areas,
so it doesn't look so harsh in the foreground.
| | 04:02 | It's a little bit more balanced.
| | 04:03 | Now this shot was shot first thing in
the morning and this whole area was in
| | 04:06 | shadow, while the city was actually
lit up fairly brightly and so this was
| | 04:11 | actually a little bit darker in
the foreground than I had wanted.
| | 04:14 | Now we can also do it with what's called Pivot.
| | 04:18 | You see what that does. Again, that's a
little bit, kind of like a brightness
| | 04:22 | control and then another one called
Lift, which is actually kind of more or
| | 04:28 | like an extreme contrast control.
| | 04:30 | Now I am going to hit Reset on that one.
| | 04:32 | So you can see now, I have actually got
some pretty decent control over my color
| | 04:37 | and I can actually darken this a
little bit to make my robot pop.
| | 04:40 | So I am actually going to go back to
my CC Basics and gain up my robot just a
| | 04:44 | little bit, to make him
kind of pop in the background.
| | 04:47 | Now you can see I have got some much
better color and now I have got a little
| | 04:51 | bit more of a unified robot in the background.
| | 04:55 | Now one of the things about
compositing is it's really about matching your
| | 04:58 | elements to your background and
making sure that they meld together,
| | 05:02 | and so color correction is
a really big part of that.
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| Using special effects| 00:00 | Another thing you can do within a
composite is to add special effects.
| | 00:05 | Now these are things like Blurs and
Film Grain and other effects that can
| | 00:09 | actually make one piece of footage look
more like another so that it looks like
| | 00:13 | it's more of a seamless composite.
| | 00:15 | Now with this robot, we've got him
actually, he still looks a little bit clean
| | 00:20 | against this backing plate.
| | 00:22 | This shadow, for example, doesn't look
like that shadow under the motorcycle.
| | 00:26 | And he looks a little bit sharp
compared to the rest of the scene.
| | 00:30 | So let's go ahead and add in a
few extra things to correct that.
| | 00:34 | So the first thing I am going
to do is play with this shadow.
| | 00:37 | Now if I go to my Pick List, you'll see,
under Compositing, I've got a number of
| | 00:42 | different ones here.
| | 00:43 | And that one I really want
to play with is called Blur.
| | 00:46 | So I can either bring it in here or
let's just our standard trick here.
| | 00:50 | I am going to highlight this line, coming out
of the shadow, right-click over it, Add from Pick.
| | 00:55 | I am going to go down to, under
Compositing, this one called Blur.
| | 01:01 | Now what Blur does is basically blur it.
| | 01:06 | So, we can click on the controls for
this, and we have two types of blur.
| | 01:11 | This Blur node can actually
do multiple times of Blur.
| | 01:14 | Now in something like After Effects,
you would have a separate one for
| | 01:17 | Gaussian Blur, a separate one for Radio Blur.
| | 01:20 | This one does it all in one node.
| | 01:22 | Now actually, what we want is just a basic blur.
| | 01:25 | We don't need to do a zoom, spin or focus.
| | 01:27 | So, I am actually going to blur out that shadow.
| | 01:29 | You can see how actually I am actually
blurring it to make it look a little bit
| | 01:32 | more like that motorcycle.
| | 01:33 | That looks pretty good, maybe a little
less, and that makes it look pretty good.
| | 01:39 | Now actually, this might be a little bit
dark, so I am going to go over to that Blend
| | 01:42 | & Comp node and just play a little
bit with the Opacity of that as well.
| | 01:48 | So there, now, I have a shadow that looks
more close to what we have under the motorcycle.
| | 01:53 | Now remember, this motorcycle is above a
dark surface and this is above a light surface.
| | 01:57 | So, you have to take that into account.
| | 01:59 | And once I have that, again, I can just scrub
and you can see how that all works together.
| | 02:04 | Now one of the things we are doing is
we are actually just making these effects
| | 02:07 | happen throughout the entire composition.
| | 02:10 | You can animate parameters and
we'll get to those a little bit later.
| | 02:15 | Now let's go ahead to another type of
effect and that's called Film Grain, which
| | 02:19 | is something that you really want to
do, particularly when you are compositing
| | 02:21 | to other types of footage and again, that's
under the Compositing menu and it's called Add Grain.
| | 02:29 | So when I have that, let's make sure I
highlight this and you could see it's
| | 02:33 | basically the type of grain and the Size.
| | 02:36 | So, if we want, we can have Red, Green or Blue.
| | 02:39 | Actually, I am going to link
those that they are all the same and so we're
| | 02:43 | going to have the amount of grain.
| | 02:44 | And you could see if I turn that way up,
you can see how grainy he gets, but we
| | 02:47 | really don't want that. We want just
a slight amount of grain, because the
| | 02:51 | footage itself is a little bit
noisy. It wasn't perfectly done.
| | 02:55 | So actually, I'm going to turn this up
and then get the size of the grain to
| | 03:00 | where I want and again, I want to link these.
| | 03:06 | Sometimes you might not want to, so I
am actually going to make the grain a
| | 03:08 | little bit smaller and then
turn down the volume here.
| | 03:14 | Now we also have Curves here, as to how
you want the grain to be applied and we
| | 03:26 | can also play with those as well.
| | 03:28 | So we have one for Red, Green and Blue
so you can actually have your grain be a
| | 03:34 | little bit more dark or light,
just depending upon how you want it.
| | 03:38 | So, these are actually more of a
midtone grain versus the high-frequency or
| | 03:41 | low-frequency grain.
| | 03:43 | So let's go ahead and turn that
down just a little bit and there we go.
| | 03:51 | So now I have some effects.
I've got my shadow blurred out a little bit.
| | 03:55 | I have got a little bit
of film grain on my robot.
| | 03:58 | See how very simply you can
add effects into a network.
| | 04:02 | So what we have here is we have grain
is coming at this point is after the color
| | 04:06 | correction and we've got our Blur coming
before we Blend & Comp that whole thing together.
| | 04:12 | And now what we have here is we've
got a fairly sophisticated network.
| | 04:16 | We've got a lot of nodes and they
all just kind of wind together into
| | 04:21 | again, this final output.
| | 04:23 | So, those are some of the
basics of adding effects.
| | 04:26 | Now when you add effects, you want to
make sure that you are reasonably subtle
| | 04:30 | with them, particularly if you
are trying to duplicate live action.
| | 04:33 | Now you can also use special effects
to create wild, crazy graphic designs,
| | 04:37 | but in this sort of application, you
want to make sure that you're subtle and
| | 04:41 | that everything matches.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Transforming footage| 00:01 | Now let's take this one step
further by adding a title into the scene.
| | 00:05 | I am going go ahead and Import
this image here called Sunday730.png.
| | 00:12 | Now, once this is imported, you can
actually see - in fact let me just go
| | 00:16 | ahead and wire this in.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to go ahead and add in a
Blend & Comp, wire this to the top, and
| | 00:25 | actually, I want to put this between my
output here, so I am actually going to
| | 00:29 | hold down the Control key, wire
that to the Input, wire this to Back.
| | 00:35 | So now I have this image here, and it
says Sunday...7:30 am...Los Angeles, and
| | 00:41 | it's really not where I want this.
| | 00:43 | I want it along this dark part of the street.
| | 00:46 | So in order to do that, I need to do
what's called a 2D Transform and this is
| | 00:51 | just another node that I
can find on the Pick List.
| | 00:53 | It's under Compositing, called 2D
Transform, but the easiest way to do this,
| | 00:57 | again, is to just highlight that wire,
right-click, go under Compositing and
| | 01:03 | find 2D Transform, and it gets wired
right in, highlight that and I can go to
| | 01:09 | the Options, or if I look into the
Viewport, you can see it actually is giving
| | 01:14 | me Transform Controls.
| | 01:15 | So, all I have to do is just move
this around and this one scales.
| | 01:21 | This is your Translate, this is your
Scale, and this is your Rotate, but
| | 01:28 | actually, I don't want to Rotate,
and all of these are reflected here.
| | 01:32 | So, if I wanted to zero out rotation, I can.
| | 01:36 | And let's just go ahead and
position that to where I want.
| | 01:39 | Now, all of this can actually be
used for Motion footage, as well.
| | 01:42 | So, if you want a piece of footage
that's moving across the screen, you can use
| | 01:45 | the 2D Transform, as well, on Image Sequences.
| | 01:48 | So, this is basically what I want in
terms of look, but it's a little bit dark.
| | 01:53 | So, I am actually going to add in just
a very quick color correction, so I am
| | 01:57 | just going to add in some color
correction basics here, click on this, go here,
| | 02:02 | and just give it some Gain.
| | 02:03 | There we go, just make it a little bit
brighter, so it pops against that background.
| | 02:10 | So as you can see, you can load Still
Images in addition to Image Sequences and
| | 02:17 | all of those can be
transformed using the 2D Transform tool.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating mattes with garbage masks| 00:00 | When doing composites, one of the more
important things that you need to learn
| | 00:04 | how to do is how to create
mattes and Garbage mattes.
| | 00:08 | So, let me show you how to do this.
| | 00:10 | We are going to use a matte
in order to wipe on this title.
| | 00:15 | So this'll be a very simple application
of a matte, but you can extend this for
| | 00:19 | whatever needs you have.
| | 00:20 | Now, mattes are actually done under
Paint/Roto. There's one called Garbage Mask.
| | 00:27 | So again, I'm just going to go into my
Composition and I am going to go after
| | 00:31 | the Color Correction on this title,
onto this wire right here and let's just go
| | 00:36 | ahead and add in a Garbage Mask.
| | 00:39 | Now, when I click on that and go
over its controls, you'll see we've got a
| | 00:44 | couple of options here.
| | 00:46 | Along here, we have a list of all the
mattes in that particular node, so you can
| | 00:51 | actually have one node
containing multiple mattes.
| | 00:55 | Then here are our tools that allow us
to draw the mattes, and then for each
| | 01:01 | matte that's selected, we have
controls for how those particular mattes work.
| | 01:07 | So before I actually get down to
matting this particular title, let me just do
| | 01:11 | a quick draw of a matte, so I can just show
you how to draw kind of random matte here.
| | 01:15 | So I am going to go ahead and
highlight this one here, and this is our Bezier
| | 01:20 | type of matte, and then all I have
to do is go into my window and then
| | 01:24 | left-click and then I can just
create whatever matte I want.
| | 01:30 | Now, once I have that matte,
you can see it shows up here.
| | 01:34 | It has a color and now I can work with it.
| | 01:38 | So, once I highlight that I can
actually go into my matte, I can change its
| | 01:42 | size, its shape, I can actually animate
these, and pretty much do whatever I want.
| | 01:47 | Now if don't want this, all I have to
do is select all points and hit Delete
| | 01:51 | and that goes away.
| | 01:54 | So, what we really want to do here
is basically create a wipe, so that's
| | 01:57 | actually going to be more of a
rectangle, than just a random shape.
| | 02:00 | So, I am going go ahead and
just draw a rectangle in here.
| | 02:04 | So as you can see, this particular
comp called isn't quite working.
| | 02:08 | That's because I'm using the wrong Composition mode.
| | 02:11 | Now, if I wanted to, I could actually
change that here before I drew it, but once
| | 02:16 | it's been drawn, I have to
change it here in this list.
| | 02:20 | So actually, I have kind of a small screen here,
so I actually kind of have to scroll over.
| | 02:24 | You might not have to worry too much
about this because you will probably be
| | 02:27 | working on a larger screen than me, but
right here is the way that we're comping
| | 02:32 | this particular mask.
| | 02:33 | Now if we had more than one mask, we would
actually have a list in this particular Window.
| | 02:39 | So, for this type of mask, we
actually want to do what's called a Cutout.
| | 02:43 | So I am just going to go and change
that to Cutout, and you see what it does is
| | 02:46 | it cuts out those pixels
and leaves what's behind.
| | 02:49 | Let me go over here and
we can see how this works.
| | 02:52 | So now, I have this particular matte,
and I can click on this and now I can
| | 02:58 | actually select all of these and if I
wanted to, I can move them. This is my matte.
| | 03:03 | Now if I wanted to actually highlight
the whole thing, I could actually just
| | 03:06 | highlight these pixels, and do my wipe.
| | 03:09 | Now this is where animation gets in, but
also notice we have a very hard edge on
| | 03:14 | this, and I really don't
want my edge to be so hard.
| | 03:17 | I want kind of a softer edge.
| | 03:18 | So, all I have to do is hit
Ctrll+Left-Click and I can actually make a
| | 03:23 | feathered edge on any mask.
| | 03:26 | So, all you have to do is
Ctrl+Drag and you are going to go outside or
| | 03:30 | inside of this to make your feathered edge.
| | 03:32 | Now I am actually going to do this
on the inside, and now if I click off
| | 03:36 | of this, go to Output,
| | 03:38 | you can see I've got kind of this
feathered edge, and if I go here, I can
| | 03:41 | actually maybe move this over
just a little bit, so you can see that.
| | 03:47 | You can see now I have that soft edge.
| | 03:49 | So, those are the basics of creating masks.
| | 03:52 | You can actually create masks of any shape.
| | 03:54 | You can create circular, rectangular masks,
or mask using Beziers, and you can use
| | 04:00 | a number of different compositing
modes to composite your footage together.
| | 04:05 | Probably the best way to work with
Garbage Masks is to just play with them.
| | 04:09 | So go ahead and start drawing some
mattes and see how they work and you'll
| | 04:13 | get the hang of it.
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| Animating parameters| 00:01 | Now let's take a look at how
to animate parameters in Toxik.
| | 00:05 | This is really important for
masking or really, almost anything else.
| | 00:08 | Toxik can animate just about any parameter.
| | 00:11 | So let's go ahead and start with the
Garbage Mask and then we'll also animate a
| | 00:15 | few other parameters.
| | 00:16 | So, we are going to highlight this Garbage Mask.
| | 00:19 | What we want to do is
animate this wiping on the title.
| | 00:23 | So I want to start this right around, say,
about half a second in, say around frame 12 or so.
| | 00:29 | Now we do animation using these keys here.
| | 00:33 | If you click AutoKey, it will
key any change that you make.
| | 00:37 | If we want, we can also explicitly
set a keyframe and these two allow us to
| | 00:42 | step between keyframes.
| | 00:44 | When we're scrubbing here, you can
see that this is pretty much blank,
| | 00:49 | but as soon as we start adding
keyframes, you'll start to see little marks in
| | 00:52 | this timeline, which will
show us where the keyframes are.
| | 00:56 | So, I am going to go ahead and highlight
my mask and I am just going to go ahead
| | 01:02 | and just select these two
points and just stretch this over.
| | 01:08 | Now once I do that, notice
how this is turned green.
| | 01:12 | I have a keyframe, so now my first
keyframe is here, but of course, I am not
| | 01:16 | going to get animation
until I have a second keyframe.
| | 01:19 | So I am going to move that over, say, to
maybe about 72, so that would be about
| | 01:24 | couple of seconds in and I'm just
going to go ahead and move that over
| | 01:30 | so it completely reveals my text.
| | 01:34 | Now you can see I have got
this basically wiping on.
| | 01:38 | So, it starts here and we do a basic wipe.
| | 01:43 | So that's the basics of how to set keyframes.
| | 01:46 | Now if I want, I can step
through my timeline by going from
| | 01:49 | keyframe-to-keyframe, here and here.
| | 01:51 | If I want to modify a keyframe, all I
have to do is just go to the Animation
| | 01:56 | tab and whatever I have selected, it
will show me the animation for this and it
| | 02:02 | really is just a curve editor. If I want, I can
frame all and you could see I have my curves.
| | 02:08 | I can select a curve.
| | 02:09 | I can change values if I want, just by
typing them in or by clicking and dragging.
| | 02:16 | Now in addition to position, we
can also change any other parameters.
| | 02:21 | Once we have wiped this on, we want to
actually let it sit for about half a
| | 02:26 | second and then fade it out.
| | 02:28 | So let's scroll out to say about frame
112 or so and then let's start a fade out
| | 02:34 | of this particular title.
| | 02:36 | Now where would we actually do a fade out?
| | 02:38 | Well, we could insert some sort of
operator here, but actually, the Blend Comp
| | 02:43 | is a great place to add in a fade.
| | 02:46 | So, I am actually going to go to my
Blend Comp node here and I am just going to
| | 02:51 | go ahead and set a keyframe for that.
| | 02:53 | So just go ahead and hit keyframe and
now, I've set a keyframe and I've set it
| | 02:58 | to its initial state.
| | 02:59 | So in order to change the Opacity,
first thing I need to do is start at 1.
| | 03:04 | So, the easiest way to do
this is just to do a quick jaunt.
| | 03:07 | So I am going to actually lower the
opacity and bring it back up and notice how
| | 03:11 | a little bar comes across there and
that tells me that that is now animated and
| | 03:16 | I have a little click right here.
| | 03:18 | Now I am just going to move forward a
little bit and just dial that down to 0.
| | 03:24 | So now, I've got it fading out.
| | 03:28 | So, we have done two sets of keyframes.
| | 03:31 | We have actually used a Garbage
Mask to wipe on our text and we've used an
| | 03:41 | Opacity to fade it out.
| | 03:43 | Now this works for basically any sort of
values, so you can do things like change color,
| | 03:49 | you can add or reduce blurring.
| | 03:51 | Any sort parameter can be
animated in this manner.
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| Rendering final output| 00:00 | Now once you have your
composition completely done,
| | 00:03 | it's time to render the final output.
| | 00:06 | Now we do this using the Render function.
| | 00:09 | So, the easiest way to do this is to
highlight the Output node and under that,
| | 00:13 | you actually have a Render function.
| | 00:16 | But before we do that, we want to make
sure that we have our image format set
| | 00:19 | right, HD 720p, the right pixels, the
right start and end frame and so on.
| | 00:25 | Once we do that, we can
actually go to our Render node.
| | 00:29 | So, we actually have two tabs here.
| | 00:31 | One is for the Destination, so we can
actually put in any sort of token here.
| | 00:38 | So if we want, we can give it the Comp
Name, we can give it the Output Name,
| | 00:43 | Date, Time and so on and so forth.
| | 00:46 | And this is actually what is showing up.
| | 00:47 | It is actually going to give us a
RenderFolder, the Version, OutputName and the FrameNo.
| | 00:54 | Actually Toxik has its own naming
scheme that it imposes and basically, it just
| | 00:59 | goes ahead and creates a directory and
names it the same name as the composition,
| | 01:03 | makes it pretty simple.
| | 01:05 | Now over here, we have our file format.
| | 01:07 | Now we can export in any one of these formats.
| | 01:10 | Just for the sake of simplicity, I
am going to export this as a JPEG.
| | 01:14 | We can also change the Gamma on the output.
| | 01:18 | Now if we want, we can also go to our
Render Preferences and actually set some
| | 01:24 | basic preferences for the project,
which will show up when we render.
| | 01:27 | We don't need to do that at this point.
| | 01:29 | Now once you have your file name and
your file format set up, then you can just
| | 01:34 | go ahead and do a render.
| | 01:36 | So I am just going to do File>Render.
| | 01:39 | Now what happens is we actually have
as many outputs nodes as we have in our
| | 01:43 | composition, we'll have here.
| | 01:47 | So I only have one output node, so I am
actually going to only have one output here.
| | 01:52 | Now we can render in one of three ways.
| | 01:54 | We can render Foreground rendering, which
means it'll show you the progress of the render.
| | 01:59 | We can also render Background, which
means it will go ahead and start rendering
| | 02:03 | and then you can go ahead and continue
to work within Toxik or you can also use
| | 02:08 | Backburner to render Toxik files as well.
| | 02:11 | We are going to go ahead and use
Foreground rendering, make sure our Start and
| | 02:16 | End frame are proper and then
just go ahead and click Start.
| | 02:21 | That's going to go ahead and just write
out all of the frames and will be done.
| | 02:25 | Now once the render is done, you
can go ahead and take a look at it.
| | 02:31 | I am actually going to go into Windows
here and if we look our Chapter05 folder,
| | 02:38 | Toxik has put in a new folder called
Renders and under it, it has a folder
| | 02:43 | called Comp_06, which is
the name of our composition.
| | 02:47 | And under that, it has all
the JPEG files that we created.
| | 02:51 | Now let's go ahead and take a look at
this. Actually, I am just using FCheck for
| | 02:55 | Maya to take a look at our
final output. And there we go.
| | 03:01 | Now we have only touched on some of the
basics of Toxik, but you can see it's a
| | 03:06 | fairly easy package to use,
once you get the hang of it.
| | 03:10 | So, go ahead and continue to
use Toxik in your projects.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | So, that's about it for Maya 2012 Getting
Started in Matchmover, Toxik and Backburner.
| | 00:07 | Now we have just grazed the surface of
these applications, but hopefully you
| | 00:10 | have enough knowledge to dive
deeper into each of these as you see fit.
| | 00:15 | So, with that, good luck, and have
fun working with Matchmover, Toxik
| | 00:20 | and Backburner.
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