G11: Midterm Report
X-Ray/Infrared (XRI) Vision
The Effect (Summary)
Our effect will simulate the ability for a person to use XRI vision to see through walls.
What is the input?
An actor will be wearing goggles with "laser" pointers to track his head direction. These pointers will project two bright red dots in the scene which will be captured in the raw footage.
A 3D scene will be created in Maya for creating the view of the room seen through XRI vision. Cameras will be calibrated using the raw footage. This 3D rendered footage may be composited with other footage.
What is the output?
We will write a program that will generate appropriately sized circles (alpha channel) based upon where the red dots are detected in the raw footage. This alpha channel will be used to mask the 3D rendered footage into the composite footage. The composite footage will be a scene where the person looks around with XRI vision and hidden parts of a room behind a wall are shown.
How many layers? what?
1. Raw footage
2. 3D rendered footage
Storyline/board
The storyline will be centered on a covert ops mission (something you would see in a game like Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, or Metal Gear Solid 2). We will have an actor wearing high-tech goggles with these special XRI lights attached to the sides. When the actor enters a room, he turns on the lights and look around on the wall of a room. The lights will create two overlapping circles that will appear on the wall/door and expose a scene from the room behind the wall/door. The actor will see either an object or a person of interest in the other room through the wall. The actor will then move into the room which will show the actual scene. At this point the actor will engage the target.
Notes
The use of the red laser pointers will preclude the existence of other bright red objects in the scene. Depending on the difficulty of judging the distance/orientation of the red dots from the camera, we may render some basic objects in the room obscured by the wall or door. If this is not feasable, we will shoot the scene from the room and then composite it with the original room/scene the actor was in. There are a couple of details that we would like to add to the basic scene. First, we do not want sharp edges for the XRI, so when we
create the alpha channel, we will need to have the transparancy taper off towards the edge of the circles. In addition, we would like the actor to be able to move his head around and have the XRI beam follow him. This is also the reason that judging depth, position, and orientation of the dots will complicate rendering the scene artificially.
Software Output
This is a sample output frame from our first revision of the software. The red laser pointer dot has been replaced by bright green for illustrative purposes. Currently, the software simply sets a threshold value for the red channel of the frame; when this threshold is exceeded, the pixel is assumed to be part of the laser beam target point. After experimenting, an appropriate value for the threshold seems to be around 180 on a scale of 0-255. This may need to be set higher for a more brightly lit scene. The sample code uses the libjpeg software which is too large to easily post here. Our next step is to devise a good method for calculating the center of the point from which to extend our alpha-mask circles.
Who will do what
Jamal:
Amir:
- Camera calibration
- Compositing
Siddharth:
Timeline/Milestones
Feburary 25:
Proposal Due
March 13:
Equipment Collected
Raw Footage
Midterm Report Due
March 25:
Maya Rendering
Software Test
Project Update Due
April 1:
Software Complete
Project Update Due
April 8:
Final Composition using Software
Project Update Due
April 10:
Preview Quality Composition
Internal Screening
April 24:
Minor Adjustments
Highest Quality Composition
Final Screening
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