Progress

I am now at the final visual stage of this project, the 3D text. I am currently putting the 3D spinning text into the scenes and rendering them out. I am planning on getting all of the shots done today and will hopefully get them into Premiere and put back together. All I have to do then is put the music in and record the voice to go with the track.

Animating the tunnel camera and putting the plates together

Over the last two days I have worked towards finishing the background plates for this project. I animated a camera in Maya to move backwards out of the 3D tunnel, and then looped the animation to play for as many frames as I needed. I then rendered out over 1000 png files to put into After Effects.

I have then spent all of today putting the shots together with the background plates and making sure everything is positioned properly and looks how I want it to. I then rendered out 10 of the 14 shots with the background plates, so they are now ready to go back into After Effects for the last effects stage, the 3D text, before being put into Premiere Pro to fix all the shots back together and add the audio for the final render. 4 of the shots have not had the background plates added because they are side views so I need to render out a side view from Maya, which I will do during the Digital Compositing class next week.

I feel as though I am getting close to finishing now and I feel confident about the work I have produced so far. I am hoping to get this project finished in the next couple of weeks so that I can concentrate on my major project, as there is more work to do for that module.

3D Tunnel

Today I have made a start on the 3D tunnel for my project. This will be the background for the video. I used Maya to create a simple 3D model of a rectangular tunnel and then textured it with images I created in Photoshop. I already new what images I wanted to use from my test footage I produced in semester 1.

The next thing I need to do is animate a camera to zoom out of the tunnel and then render out those frames, ready to go into After Effects for the final composit.

The images above are the textures I created in Photoshop

 

 



 

Screen shots of the model in Maya

More Rotoscoping!

Today I finally finished the effects on my model footage. I had to rotoscope a lot of the shots because I couldn't track all the underwear in every shot because occasionally they went out of shot, therefore making them impossible to track. Again it took ages, but I was willing to do it to produce the effect I wanted on every shot.

I have enjoyed working with this footage and creating all of the effects, but a lot of them are so time consuming and tedious that I am quite glad to be moving on to the next stage in the project, which is producing the 3D environment for the background plates.

3D Text

Today I created the 3D text for my video. I did this in 3D Studio Max. I created the words 'Fashion' and 'Style' and did each one in two colours so that I have options. It was really easy and only took 10 minutes.

Underwear- Alternative Method

Today I began thinking of other easy I could cover my models underwear, as it is clear that the clone stamp tool won't work, and I didn't want to leave it, partly because it doesn't look grew and partly for the sake of the modesty of my model. I used a sample of the 3D text to see how much of the area the text is going to cover, but it wasn't enough to cover on its own.

I therefore watched a few tutorials and found one about pixelating someones face in a shot. I watched this tutorial and used the same method to blur and add noise to the underwear areas of my shots. I really liked the effect and although you could still see she is wearing underwear, it isn't as apparent and exposing. I used the motion tracker to track the underwear and then used an alternative layer to mask and add the effects.

This technique won't work for a few of the shots because the underwear goes in and out of the shot and is therefore untrackable, so I think I may have to rotoscope these areas (oh goody!)

Im hoping to have this all done by the end of the week so that I can start the 3D elements to my project, and then I'm on the home stretch!

Rotoscoping and Clone Stamp tool

The rotoscoping is finished!! Finally!! I'm really glad to have gotten that out of the way and now can move on to more interesting aspects of my project. The next thing I need to do is remove the underwear on my model. When I tested this in the first semester I used the clone stamp tool, which worked to an extent. It produced good results on small areas such as bra straps, but didn't work well removing everything as I couldn't get the texture to look smooth, or anything like skin. I think I've picked a really difficult thing to do because skin is so many different shades that it is really awkward to try and replicate.

However, because it worked well on the small areas I decided I would still use the tool and would think of another technique to use on the areas that wouldn't work with the clone stamp. But it isn't as easy this time around, and I am struggling with removing the bra straps at the moment. I will persist with the tool for now but I may have to look into an alternative technique for this portion of the project.