Red Dawn – Camera Mapping In Vue
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
It’s been quite a while since my last try in animating a painting of mine. While the older tries were quite respectable i really wanted to push it this time. I read, heard and saw a lot about camera mapping and its theory. Now Vue has the ability to do camera mapping (also called camera projection) too. This allows you to lay a painting on a geometry and allows you to create limited camera moves with nice perspective shifts. Depending on how much work you spend on it. I surely spend a lot for this one.
I worked on this project for almost 2 months. Not on and off though. Partly because the rendering out the different elements took ages. Especially the volumetric things like fog and clouds. And these were rendered on very low quality settings. Since motion blur is smoothing out certain things it was not too important to render the volumetrics in unnecessary details. While the rendering of the projected painting took 6hrs for 511 in 1080p frames, the fog pass took about 12-15hrs for 511 frames. And i didn’t render it once. I had a lot of testrenders for each of the passes. Now i can roughly estimate how much CPU power a big VFX studio must have.
I chose my Red Dawn painting because in the painting i didn’t change much of the actual Vue render. So the geometry in the Vue file still fitted the painting nicely. I removed the forground element though since it wasn’t a good addition to the camera move i had in mind. I already had an animation project in mind when i did the painting. Now i had the right ambition and time.
A lot of postwork got also done in After Effects. Especially the stitching of the different elements. The blending of the render passes. Vue is able to render out the animations in uncompressed avi format. That means for 511 frames in 1080p it resulted in a 3gb file. Unfortunately the files were corrupted and not to open by any player. I reopened these files in VirtualDub, which was able to read the files, and saved them through VDub as avi again. That made the files recognizable for all players and After Effects. I don’t know what was going on but as soon as the animation video file reached 1gb, it made them uneadable. Maybe some avi internal limitation thingie from ancient times. I have no idea.
Ultimately i must admit that i’m not 100% happy with the end result. But that’s because of technical and time issues. You could work forever on stuff like that. Nonetheless it is a nice step forward in comparison to my earlier tries.
Hope you guys enjoy this shorty. For me it’s always a special thing to see an animation of one of my paintings. It’s like bringing these static pintings to live. That’s a cool thing!
Download – 720p Quicktime – 160mb
Download – 540p Quicktime – 80mb
Online – Vimeo (HD)
Online – Youtube (HD)
Thanks for your attention.
Regards
It’s time to make downloading of wallpapers even more comfortable than it already was! The future! New alternatives! New hopes! New dreams! Alright… enough advertising phrases for now. Windows 7 has that one unique feature that allows you do create your own Wallpaper Packs! People can download and doubleclick these and *kaboom* Windows automatically applies the pack and its settings! I really dig that. That’s why i decided to create some packs for selected artworks in my gallery from time to time. All at once would be boring right? ;) However. In these packs i try to cover all possible standard resolutions. So it’s surely worth a look. I thought that Fractal and Abstract pictures, which work magnificient as wallpapers, are the perfect start for this collection. For now you can find Themepacks for the following pieces:
