G5-Update1
Super Goalie A Number 1
Let's Happy Together
The Effect
Super human goalie speed. A goalie blocks many shots at once. The balls will be moving at normal speed. The goalie will move between normal speed and super speed. In super speed, the frame rate is accelerated and after images are added to give the effect of fast movement.
What is the input?
Goalie
Footage of a goalie moving to block shots. This will be choreographed behavior and no actual balls will be in the shot. The speed effect will be added to this input.
Balls
Because of the difficulty of using difference mattes with quickly moving objects, we have revised this part of the effect to using computer generated balls. The balls will be created and simulated with Maya and added over the goalie layer to match up with choreographed goalie movements.
What is the output?
The final video will show soccer players gambling on whether or not a goalie can stop all their shots. The kickers will shoot at the goal at once so the balls arrive almost simultaneously. The goalie will block all of these shots using the super speed effect. At the end, the goalie wins the bet.
How many layers?
There will be two basic layers for our effect. These two layers can be duplicated into many layers. One layer is the goalie moving to block the balls. The second layer is the balls moving. Additional balls will be layered on top of each other for sequences of multiple balls in frame at once.
Test footage
For our test footage, we filmed our goalie blocking imaginary balls. But before we started filming, we decided to choreograph the goalie's movements and practice the moves so we can get an idea of how the shot will be set up. We also wanted a dynamic and "exciting" shot so we came up we movements that had our goalie move through the breadth of our frame. Also, if we left if up to the goalie to ad-lib the blocks, it wouldn't look as "real" and making the audience believe the shot is a big part of film making.
We then added a ball layer on top of the raw footage using Maya and Premiere. This was a little bit difficult because we did not have the calibration equipment with us during the shoot. However, we came up with an acceptable solution by using the actual lines on the field to find the vanishing point, and we lined up a virtual plane by hand until we thought it looked good.
Update
We shot another round of goalie footage. This footage has helped us solidify our choreography. We intended this to be our final footage but the weather and lighting conditions did not cooperate. The lighing fluctuated because of cloud cover and there was too much wind to use this footage. Based on the choreography we set up at this shoot we should be able to film the final effect footage quickly on a day with good conditions.
In this shot, you can see a line of pebbles on the field. We were planning on using this line and the line painted on the field to create a vanishing point so we could find the ground plane in Maya. We used a similar technique for our first update. We had to do this since we did not have access to a large enough calibration pattern. A trip to Home Depot's flooring department should remedy this problem in the future.
OpenCV
In addition to speeding up the frame rate of the goalie, we will use OpenCV to design a customized blurring effect. Instead of blending the actor with background pixels, we will blur the actor across time. Each frame will be rendered using weighted averages of previous frames as well as future frames. The tool we build will allow us to adjust the weight curve for the best looking effect and specify the beginning and end frames of a sequence to render.
Update
Here's a rough look at our customized blurring effect. Currently we're blurring 7 frames together to get a time blur - the original and 3 from the past and 3 from the future. We'll refine our tool so that we can play around with different weight curves and use different amounts of frames for different types of movement. Also, it might be worthwhile to do some convolving to make the blur smoother. We'll keep updating this every week until we get it just right.
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
Maya
The Maya ball model still needs to be created. We are debating whether we should download a ball or create the textures from scratch. We will try creating a texture from scratch first. We may end up replacing this texture with one matching the real balls more closely. We still have to figure out how to create shadows on an invisible plane.
To Do
- Refine the blurring effect
- Texture our soccer ball models
- Figure out how to get the balls to cast shadows
Who will do what
Andrew
- Storyboards
- Act as Goalie
- Effect Programming
Alex
- OpenCV
- Effect Programming
- Sound Engineer
- Casting Agent
Jeff
- Compositing Soccer Ball Plate
- Editing
- Effect Programming
- CG Soccer Ball Model / Texture / Animation
Timeline - Updated March 14
March 1 - Proposal Due
March 8 - Experimental Footage Done
March 15 - Midterm Report Due
March 27 - Goalie Footage – update
March 29 - Project Update 1
April 5 - Project Update 2
April 5 - Effect Coding Complete
April 10 - Non-effect footage – update
April 12 - Project Update 3
April 12 - Final Composition and Editing
April 14 - Internal Screening
April 28 - External Screening
Link to this Page
- DVFX 2005 Groups last edited on 7 August 2005 at 11:52 am by pcp08664669pcs.500ash01.tn.comcast.net