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Author Topic: Anim8or IRL??  (Read 5944 times)

davdud101

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Anim8or IRL??
« on: June 26, 2012, 02:47:50 pm »

Heyhey, friends. Last night I watched a documentary on Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and the major visual effects and animation work they do on many big films. (for those of you who wanna know more, look them up.)
So I've always been interested in combing live-action with computer animation. That's where the community comes in!
A free 3d camera-tracking software is out there called VooDoo. While my personal experiences with it have generally been a little disastrous, lots of other people have combined live footage and 3d with it and got quite pleasing results. I read a short thread elsewhere online about voodoo being a good tool in the toolkit- Steve himself commented on it.

So to sum up this thread, I want to find a way to transport these tracked 3d camera movements into anim8or and use them as the camera.
Any ideas? Scripts? Tools? Thanks ;)
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Janro

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Re: Anim8or IRL??
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2012, 08:28:12 am »

Pardon the not so positive outlook, but I'm not sure if this is readily capable. Mainly because Anim8or isn't capable of alpha channels for rendering(afaik? Well a fake one maybe? o.o I forgot if Anim8or can render out a alpha channel map thing for compositing). Unless of course your willing to render the video in the background itself.

If someone can think of a workaround by all means. ^^ Otherwise, that's the only thing I can think of that would hinder Anim8or for use with tracked backgrounds.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2012, 08:31:18 am by Janro »
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dwsel

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Re: Anim8or IRL??
« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2012, 09:49:24 am »

I was looking a while ago at this software.

In the manual of it it's written:
'File → Save → Textfile
This menu item exports the estimated camera parameters and 3D feature points into a text file. We suggest you parse this file if you want to write your own import filter for an application that is currently not supported by the Voodoo Camera Tracker. '
So devs suggest to write own parser for the text file (I don't know how it looks like, and if that would be difficult to do)

BTW, have you seen this http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=108.0 topic?
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davdud101

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Re: Anim8or IRL??
« Reply #3 on: June 27, 2012, 04:33:41 pm »

@Janro, It's totally understandable that you wouldn't think it's possible or easy. I really think the biggest thing is not even getting the object into the scene, but getting the camera to stick to the real-life camera.
Although the poor-man's way of working this is to simply examine how you camera moves in the footage and then try to move the object in the same way with the same timing.

@dwsel, I actually referenced that thread, but didn't have a link. Thanks for posting it! I'm not much of a developer myself, and I'm not sure if anyone about has the guts or need to create something that sounds so very complex. Thanks for the info, hopefully someone can get a team together... or I can try Icarus and Ic2An8.
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