Talking Dog + Tutorial

[yog]

Thanks for the tutorial CoolCalb, it answered a couple things I just couldn't get my head around.


Cool advert as well. I wouldn't have noticed so much had been reused unless you had said.

Cheers.

[rubberduck]

A tube of superglue on the dogs lips would have saved you hours ( Only joking for all you animal lovers out there. )

Nice tutorial. Ta.

[olf]

thank you so much!
I really appreciate that you posted this tutorial, so cool! this seems to be an easy and fast method!
thanx!!!

---what language are the guys speaking...? did you know what you were animating?

[CoolCalb]

thanks!

rubberduck, it was a hot day, and the dog had to cool himself..
so we tried to turn the airconditioning in the car, but then he wouldnt
take his head out the window.. he wanted to sit infront of the air
flow... we turned it off, so he jumped out of the car...
we had a replacment dog.. he wouldnt even go inside the car...
it was a nightmare..

the dog, also was drooling like a maniac.. every few seconds, his owner
had to wipe his mouth with a big towel.. so disggusting.. :) hehe

[fwahhhh]

Nice job. How well did Boujou handle those tracks? I've only used it for camera tracking, so I'm curious as to how this was done. Wrong forum, I suppose. E-mail me if you wish.

Thanks!

[CoolCalb]

I think I can answer you here.. :)

before I met with the dog, I thoght of putting little white markers on his face,
but after seeing him, I realized he has enugh wrinkles and other details
on his face, plus he wasnt very friendly :) so I skipped the markers..
(the flame artist, owns me one :0 )

Boujou did quite a good job.. the dog had some internal movements
(like moving his eyes, or small movments of his nose and upper lips)
so I had to mask them out.. plus I masked the whole background out..
I tried to track only his skull area- minus the internal moving parts..

In most cases, it worked on the first time.. other times, I had to tweak
the mask a bit more accurate, and had to delete some potentialy bad trackers
before I ran a camera solution..

and of course, when exporting, you have to choose static camera, moving scene..

Cheers!

[visualride]

Nice tutorial! I came up with a similar workflow a few years ago for a Nickelodeon television show called '100 Deeds for Eddie Mcdowd'.

I used MayaLive for the motion capture and 3ds Max for the camera projection mapping and rendering. Finally I used Combustion for the final composite and clean up.
The hardest part, as you have seen, is getting sticky projection maps per frame. A Max plugin guru named Peter Watje wrote a little plugin to do basically what you have done in XSI with scripting.
I'm just learning XSI, so your tutorial is much appreciated.
On the show there were a few talking dogs, but mostly a pug (the one from M.I.B.), and a shepherd mutt. We had to use a few tricks to get decent tracking points because of the 16 mm film, and the lack of detail in the shepherds face. We ended up using Combustion to separate out the blue and red chroma and messing with the contrast to tease out good track points.
No one believed that we could track this much footage for a weekly television show, so I used every trick to speed up workflow. One trick that I used was MagPie Pro for phonemes to drive the morph targets in Max. Not the cleanest way to animate, but with out time constraints a face rig setup was too labor intensive for all the dialog.

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