Following from the last week, learning about camera tracking and creating point clouds in a 3D space, we moved onto final positioning a 3D asset into the scene. Originally, I wanted to create a levitating droplet of water which would be placed in the center of the shot or even a few copies of it around the place, but having troubles in exporting the AOV passes from Maya and incorrect sequence length, I used the asset provided by Aldo instead.
Firstly, the footage was read in, all the settings were updated (frame rate, sequence length), I denoised and created a camera track using the result. I also applied the LensDistortion node to the provided Lens Grid card. For the Camera tracking I masked out the lake, as we should not be using the reflection based information. Then I wrote out the camera information using the WriteGeo node.
Then I broke down all the passes of the 3D object and colour graded them accordingly to match the scene. Since the HDRI that was applied to it was taken in a different lighting setting (the forest) and having troubles exporting objects from Maya, I couldn’t have changed the HDRI lighting, so I was trying to adjust the colours of reflection and diffuse passes instead. I copied the alpha back into the object, applied distortion and noise back to the asset and merged with the background.
Another problem that I noticed was the incorrect movement of the assets compared to the scene. Since the object I used had the tracking information of a different shot, hence the way that it is situated is wrong compared to this shot.