Week 7 – Dom’s matchmove session 1

Week 8 – Dom’s matchmove session 1

This week we had a very interesting session on matchmove and motion tracking using 3D Equalizer with Dom Maidlow, who is a CG Generalist at Union FX.

There are many different types of tracking in film and TV, and it is used constantly. Apparently there is a massive shortage of matchmove artists, and if you know how to track footage in this way, it’s a good way into the industry.  

Tracking – recreating camera movements and lens distortion. Able to add CG elements to a film and CG environments. It’s important to know and use the correct lenses and cameras, or you won’t track efficiently. Tracking is also finding out the depths of environments, and recreating a virtual map of those environments that need tracking.

Facial tracking – Allowing facial movements to be added to CG characters (eg. Gollum).

Object tracking – Tracking movements of objects to characters (guns, blood splatters, arrows, lightsabers, explosions).

Rotomation – Matching movements of objects and actors. Can manually add CG assets to live action.

‘Plate’ – live action shot to work on.

‘Lidars’ – 3D environment scan (very expensive equipment).

3D Equalizer is the main software used in industry for tracking. 

3DE process:

• Set up camera and lens.
• Track scene
• Lens distortion
• 3D orientation
• Check scene sticks with markers
• Export ST-Map (lens distortion to flatten plate) and points to Maya/Nuke
• Lineup shot and scale scene in Maya

You must set some markers in places where there is a lot of contrast and not too much movement, for instance corners of window frames, shadows on walls or anything very static. Placing a marker on trees/nature is not a good idea because they tend to move a lot. You then set a keyframe and once the marker is cut out of shot, you place an endframe a couple of frames before the marker disappears. These markers are used to create a virtual map of the plate you are working on.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to learn on this course, as well as 3D software skills. However, the interface is awful!