Categories
Nuke

Week 8:2D Tracking

Shuffle

Shuffle lets you:

  1. rearrange up to 8 channels from a single image (B input). For example, you can use it to swap rgba. red for rgba. green, and vice versa,
  2. rearrange channels between two separate nodes (A and B input), like a foreground and background branch.
  3. replace a channel with black (removing the alpha channel, for example) or with white (making the alpha solid, for example),
  4. create new channels.

PlanarTracker

PlanarTracker is a powerful tool for tracking surfaces that lie on a plane in your source footage. Planar tracking is often better than tracking individual points (with the Tracker node for instance) as it takes a great deal more information into account and gives you a more accurate result. A rigid surface, like a wall or a side of an object, are good planes to track. You can use your tracking results to replace the tracked plane with another image for instance. You can define the region to track by creating and animating roto shapes.

Conerpin 2D

The CornerPin2D node is designed to map the four corners of an image sequence to or from positions derived from tracking data. In practice, this node lets you replace any four-cornered feature with another image sequence. You can use it to place an image in an on-screen television, for example.

Before using this node, you should use the Tracker node to generate four tracks, one per corner, on the feature requiring replacement.

Convolve

G

Categories
Maya

Week 8:Constrains

In week 8, I used blendshape and join to create an animation of a character’s open mouth expression, this animation is not natural and not good enough, I still need to improve it.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 6:Academic Writing Approaches

The authenticity of a documentary is ‘deeply linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images are linked to notions of realism and the idea that documentary images bear evidence of events that actually happened, by virtue of the indexical relationship between image and reality’

Horness Roe. A. (2013) Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The authenticity of the documentary is demonstrated by

A documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture intended to ‘document reality’.

And the concept of realism is ‘Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements’. 

Both are based on real events, without adding fictional elements and avoiding modifications that contradict the truth.

Also, Documentaries convey information by restoring images of realistic scenes and providing evidence of the actual events that took place.

Categories
Maya

Week 7:Hierarchies/rigging

In this session, we start to adjust the parts of the UV and texture that don’t match, thinking about character face binding, adding joints first so that the head can move as a whole, and then the facial expression details.

Categories
Nuke

Week 7:Match moving – point tracking

Categories
Nuke

Week 6:Merging and colour matching

Color:Logarithmic and Line

Colorcorrect(pressing C on Node Graph)

The ColorCorrect node is used to make quick adjustments to contrast, gamma, gain, and offset. You can apply these to a clip’s master (entire tonal range), shadows, midtones, or highlights.

You can control the range of the image that is considered to be in the shadows, midtones, and highlights using the lookup curves on the Ranges tab. However, do not adjust the midtone curve – midtones are always equal to 1 minus the other two curves.

OCIOColorSpace

Much like the standard ColorSpace node, you can use the OCIOColorSpace node for converting an image sequence from one colorspace to another. The OCIOColorSpace node is based on the OpenColorIO library.

Blur:

Erode blur

Similar to Erode (filter) , but smoother, input pixels are filtered relative to the size  control. Negative values cause brighter areas to expand into darker areas and positive values cause darker areas to expand into lighter areas – particularly useful with mattes. Additionally, you can add blur to the input using the blur  and quality  controls.

Categories
Maya

Week 6:Detailing and texturing

This week, we added more details to the figure model, such as double eyelids and wrinkles. The adjustments have also made the model more aesthetically pleasing and we have also made his texture maps, for the skin and the eyes respectively.

Categories
Nuke

Week 5:Balloon Festival

In this lesson, we learned about tracker.

2D tracker that allows you to extract animation data from the position, rotation, and size of an image. Using expressions, you can apply the data directly to transform and match-move another element. Or you can invert the values of the data and apply them to the original element – again through expressions – to stabilize the image.

Combine alpha

Channelmerge

The ChannelMerge node lets you merge together one channel from each input and save the result in the selected output channel. All other channels are copied unchanged from the B input.

If no A input is connected, both channels to merge are taken from the B input.

By default, ChannelMerge combines the inputs’ alphas.

Grade (pressing G on Node Graph)

Lets you define white and black points by sampling pixels from the Viewer. Setting the brightest parts of the image to pure white and the darkest to pure black in this manner can help you add punch to overexposed images, for example. You can also use this node for matching foreground plates to background plates.

To sample pixels from the Viewer, click on a color swatch to the right of the control you want to set. The eye dropper icon appears. In the Viewer:

  1. Ctrl/Cmd+click to sample a single pixel from the node’s output.
  2. Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+drag to sample a region of pixels from the node’s output.
  3. Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+click to sample a single pixel from the node’s input while viewing its output.
  4. Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+Shift+drag to sample a region of pixels from the node’s input while viewing its output.
  5. Crtl/Cmd+ right-click cancels pixel selections.

Clamps

This node constrains, or clamps, values in the selected channels to a specified range. By default, it clamps all channels to values between 0 and 1. This can be useful for ensuring that the input’s blackest blacks and whitest whites will be visible on an intended display device, or for restricting data fed to a subsequent node that does not support numbers outside this range.

Reformat

Keymix

Keymix for green screen key:IBKcolor(A)+primatte(B)+roto(Mask)

Categories
Maya

Week 5:Head modelling:Quad Draw and Shape Editor

In this session, we started modelling the head, starting with Quad Draw then adjusting the wiring, as well as sculpting the face, which gives the face a softer, more natural look, and our initial foray into Blendershape.

Categories
Design for Animation

Week 5 :Politics and Documentary in film and animation

Animated documentaries are a form of moving image that combines animation and documentary, and I think that even through animation as a form of artistic expression the nature of documentary still exists, and the answer is Definitely.

Walking by the Canadian animator and artist Ryan Larkin made an indelible mark in the history of animation with its innovative combination of drawing and colour wash techniques. But as far as Walking is concerned, I don’t think of it as an animated documentary, walking is the subject and animation is the form of its presentation. He doesn’t refer to specific times and certain real-life cases, nor does he tell a story, he just animates the moments of different people walking from different angles, but of course, there is no denying that walking is the most common thing for most people, and the author adds his personal touch to it, making it interesting and advanced.

I agree with Honess Roe’s idea:

‘animated documentaries do not easily into the received wisdom of what a documentary is’

Animated documentaries have overturned the public perception of traditional documentaries. Compared to traditional documentaries, animated documentaries give people more scope for imagination. In terms of character design, animated documentaries highlight the characters’ characteristics through elements such as their appearance and expressions, which visually help viewers to distinguish and understand them.