Here is some test footage of low resolution rendering of the animation on maya. It helps to view in this lower resolution because it takes so long to render in high quality. this way you can make the changes you want quicker.

Evaluation

I was very excited when I was given this brief as I really wanted to focus on 3D this year. I choose the SYFY channel as it was the one in the criteria that demanded 3d compositing.  I decided I wanted to use the film Cloverfield as inspiration for this 20 sec ident. The storyboards I drew up at first were far to complex and through my first presentation of my work I realised I needed to break down my idea from a whole story, to just some action of people running on screen and dragging someone off. On top of this I was going to composite the model of the space ship I was going to create.  I started off my project with some test footage. I had never tried to composite 3D on to live footage before so I went about trying to create that. I started on after effects, got some footage from a past project then using tracker motion on after effects I went about picking a point in the footage that I was going to use to track the motion of what ever image or sequence I choose .The result of test footage came through with poor quality so I went about finding another way to track the motion. Match mover is a program that is used for just that reason. I looked up some tutorials to find out how it worked. i had some troubles with the new software. i was then told that it would be a lot more easier to match on to static footage. I filmed on the Friday the 16^th. The people I used to act in my project had done acting either in school or/and in college. I had some problems on set as I was shooting of the street and had to deal with traffic and pedestrians getting in shot. I then started to model my spacecraft. The original drawing I made ended up being to complicated so I drew up a new design. The description of how I modelled it are on my blog. On Maya I had to set up a plane with the video footage so I could set up the perspective camera ready to animate to it. I set up the camera to the same specs as the camera the footage was filmed on, this was so that 3D animation would look correct as is it moved in the focal points of the shot. I then keyed in the animation of the spaceship. I wanted to make it look like it was hovering then when the people moved out of camera it was going to swing round and shoot of towards them out of camera. Trying to get the motion to look smooth was very hard because the model wasn’t just on the Y or X axis it was rotating around, so when I went on to the graph editor I couldn’t just edit the points because they wouldn’t match up.  I then had to try and composite. Once I had set up the camera on maya, compositing the 3D on to the video was just placing it on top on a layer on after effects. I then played around with both the lighting and colour corrections of both visuals. The trouble was the shadows that I had to render separately from maya, because it didn’t render out properly, I had to set up a shadow pass on an alfa channel layer and set up the lighting and shadow so that it would only render out the shadows . I then added some text effect using after effects then took it in to final cut and added some broken camera effects to give it the look of Cloverfield. Over all I think I followed the brief well and produced a product that set out to captivate the audience of people who would watch the channel. It used 3D effects and had visual effects made on after effects.  

Animating in Maya

The images below show how i tried to make it look like the spaceship was in the scene. I had to model with a still of the scene in the background with the camera attributes as the one i used to film the live footage. i had to put a floor in so that i would be able to put a shadow in that would follow the ground of the footage. i had to use a world lighting setting that used the image from the footage which picks up where there should be light. i put in some area and directional lighting in so that the shadows would look realistic to the surroundings.

once i had sorted out the scene i could start keying the motion. i tried to make it look as smooth as possible but it still looks a little to jumpy an not enough like its actually hovering.

Finished renders.

I would like to go back and actually create some decent textures of the model. for what i need it for though i think it looks the part.

These are the cleaned up drawings from my sketches. I took them in to Maya and placed them on planes so that i could model to a guide.

This is one of the later stages of modeling.

I had to change my design as creating it was a bit awkward and i was putting myself through to much in the way of modeling.

some concept drawings i came up with for the space ship.

Pre-Production

Here some storyboards and concept ideas i originally had for this project.

my story soon had to change as there was no way that i was going to be able to get everything in the storyboards into 20 sec or be able to get it all done in time.