Compositing 3D with Moving Live Action Footage

#1

Hello I’m a 3D major and am getting more into VFX work. The programs I’m using are After Effects CS6 and Maya 2012, I have tried this before with lackluster results, the 3D object stood out like a sore thumb mainly because I couldn’t replicate the lighting and I just need general guidance to get it to blend/work. I’ll spell out the steps I’m aware of:

-The footage is brought into Maya on a camera which I lock and match to the video size.
-The object I need is brought in and hand animated/ tracked to match the location of the footage.
-I bring in lights to try and match the scene lighting (I’m a bit confused on how to get this to work better)
-Export the gif images and bring into after effects where further color correcting is done.

The last project I did this with was extending shorts with Ncloth
The project I will need this for will be wings, not sure if the feathers will be modeled or if I will have the time to learn Fur.

So yeah any advice would be vastly appreciated.

#2

camera tracking and matchmoving isnt a trivial thing to do, it needs some time to master it

you should track you footage with the camera tracker in AE or a dedicated matchmoving app, or blender has also a quiet good camera tracking part.
then export your matchmove camera and if needed any matchmove objects (= object tracking) to a format you can bring into maya
import your footage into maya as background images
then import the tracked camera (and object tracks) into maya
add your 3d objects to the scene, link to the object tracks or hand animate them to move correct in the scene
light and shade your 3d objects to match your footage. if you can: make reference pictures at the shooting location (a grey ball and a mirror ball, a color chart) and shoot a HDR image of the location. this will bring you very close to the actual lighting at the scene

#3

Hey pingking thank you for the input,

my footage has some moving people that I’m trying to attach wings to, I tried voodoo (super slow at tracking) and importing into Maya, it had terrible results.

Then I tried Matchmover and it did a better job but the camera was still jittery, (probably from the figures moving, even if I masked out the figures when tracking I don’t see how that would help me (the points are all stationary)

So I basically just manually keyframed the 3D object and it’s all floaty, not the tight track I was looking for: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k0i5xj2cmg3nocv/wings.mp4?dl=0

Any further advice?

Thank you!

#4

for the footage you showed i would go with a 2d tracker or the planar tracker in ae (mocha ae)
you could render you wings from your 3d app and then 2d track them onto the footage.

because here is no complex camera move or a big shift in perspective, which would requiere a 3d track