Month: February 2021

This week we learnt about the 3D motion tracking. Having worked a bit in the 3D space in Nuke, it was important to understand the Camera Tracking node, all the settings within it, how the tracked information was incorporated into the scene and further combined with the original footage. I practiced with the two shots: first being a shot of a museum room and the second being the shot of Crypt we have been provided with.

The procedure went as follows: the footage was denoised and read back into the script. Then it was adjusted to be clearer for the camera tracked and tracked. I roughly knew the camera it was originally shot on, so that information was filled in accordingly. After that, with a general error being close to 1, with increasing the tracker length and adjusting the numbers for min and max errors, I got it down to 0.77, making the camera tracking information better as a result. That took a lot of trial and error procedure. Then I created the cards and placed them accordingly in the 3D space, alongside with the cones.

I also roto-ed out the sign in the left side of the space as well as the door and stone wall of the arch, as the camera moved in, revealing the second room.

For the Crypt, I followed the same procedure, except I had to break it into 2 parts. Firstly, denoised and tracked the shot. Then, I created and placed the cards and cones into the first part of the space, rotoscoping out the big hole in the wall and placing it accordingly over various frames. After writing out the sequence with newly introduced assets, I read it back in the project and did the similar process for the room being revealed. Except this time I applied an Invert node to the roto of the hole in the wall, such that the planes and cones could be placed inside that area.

Nuke has the ability to operate and compose in 3D space and this week we were learning more about it. We learnt of the importance of the nodes such as Camera, Scene and ScanlineRender and had to complete an exercise in projecting a 2D image onto a 3D space. I chose this image of a abandoned room to project.

Practicing to align the card node with the use of checkerboard, it took me a while to understand how to place it correctly in the scene. Before any placement I had to evaluate the camera lens that was used, and I chose the focal length to be 16mm, as it looks like it was a wide lens with big distortion towards the edges. The walls appear to be have a different incline in vertical directions and not entirely parallel to each other.

As the scene has smaller details, such as sneakers on the floor, a cable hanging from the ceiling or the opened windows – a further work using other cards with a roto of these elements could be done.