Updated the first page with some color progressions. Any input would be great!
Scott
Nice, but make the features rough enough that the animation still features detail while being rendered in broadcast quality. I spend some time today animating my math sphere’s which I discovered recently and to my dismay it looks terrible as it’s to detailed. I re-did stuff coarser and it looks much better in the animation but its crapola as a still…
As my neighbor always says: Nobody will see ‘that’ out of the window of a fast moving bus…
Cheers
LemonNado
PS: How do you align the animated rhino with the ‘moving’ scene. A swift kick in the right direction would be greatly apreciated. You’re not mixing that manually frame by frame are you???
Thanks for the input Lemonado,
Right now I am trying to set up quick and dirty FG renders in Mental ray as the lighting model we are using will vasty affect the look of the texture… On my elephant I found it helped, but I need to see hwat it does tho this texture too. I hadnt even tought about what motion blur and animation would do to it : )
We matched the rhino to the live action with a package called MatchMove. Jon Campbell tracked those green points on the side of the road to make a 3D camera that matched the real one. we then used that camera in Maya and the resulting grounplace generated by the matchpoints.
Scott
Animator for the project here…glad you all like:)
Lemanndo, that would have been sheer insanity man. Like scott said, we ended upwith a nice maya scene with the road in it. I simply animated the rhino running on that. The cam was jumping all over the place, it was humerous to watch in the playblasts:). To keep my sanity, I created my own cam that didn’t move so much so I really see the animation.
Scott, color maps are looking sweet man. I can’t wait to see this done. We gonna make the VFX show?
Yeah we will make the show. I slept a couple days ago so its all good : P
Here is a variant on the head. Im having a horrible time getting these not to look “dead” ao I am adding a lot of tempature variantion. Hopefully it helps.
do an ibl fg, pass hdri if you can. with very low intensity you can get some nice colored bounce light. then add it in the comp. your shadows dont have any color to then. thats part of the reason the render might seem dead. and play with the saturation of your maps in ps. looks good overall tho. 
It’s really nice 
Elendil: Thanks : )
brook: Good call! I hadnt thought about th fact the shadows were dead I was so involved in the color maps themselves. This is kind of like working blind since the final render is with an HDR image I dont have at the moment : / crazy I know but I hope the discrepancy isnt too much.
Thanks for the input, its invaluable right now!
Scott
Well I think this is final. Whew…
All maps created in Zbrush. Now its off to the renderfarm for a few hours : )
great the last render !!
love the angry pose 
Just amazing what you guys did. Really, really good.
One question (just curious):
Why did you guys choose MoveMatcher for tracking? You used Maya for the animation, why didn’t you use Maya Live for that? (or the other prog that I would know is Boujou)
Check out Syntheyes!
Lemo
Woah, old thread resurrected! lol
I used Matchmover because I am didnt know how to use Maya Live and I have not heard very many success stories with Live. Mostly it was I already knew Matchmover (and it was part of the pipeline) and I was able to track the shot sucesfully and quickly with it.
-jon
Thanks for your help, lemonnado and vrljc!
I can’t buy another software package right now. Therefore, I am going to try out Maya Live.
Has anyone seen tutorials for Maya Live? (I couldn’t find one)
I found this a camera tracker software for free on this website:
http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html
It’s Voodoo Camera Tracker called. I haven’t tried it (it’s currently not for Mac), but I found the link on other forums and they recommended it.
Some examples:
http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/test_production.html
The voodoo camera tracker estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for long video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction or video coding. The estimated parameters can be exported to 3D animation packages Softimage 3D,Maya, 3D Studio Max or Blender.
The voodoo camera tracker works very alike to commercial available camera trackers (also called match movers). (e.g. Science D Visions 3D Equalizer, 2d3 boujou, RealViz Matchmover,…).
May be someone can use it! Check it out!