Samuel Iwaniak's Kinect Project

Here is the video in all it's glory! Watch in High Definition.

Reflection

After finishing this project I have realized that it’s a very time consuming process, and that animators who do motion tracking on big Hollywood pictures like “Avatar”, “Inception”, and “TRON” deserve a lot of recognition and praise, as it took me a while to solve a simple solution on a 12 second clip, which still proved to be difficult. One of the biggest problems with the first piece of footage I had was that the motion of the camera was too fast, which didn’t let boju track and trace a specific point of interest, resulting in me having to go out and film other footage. The original plan for the first piece of footage was to track the 3D Kinect scan of me onto the hand of my video, so basically with that footage being rubbish I went next door with my High Definition camera and got my friend to simply record the palms of my hands whilst slowly panning around them. With this footage being shot inside a building it was easier for Boju to pick up more points of interest I could choose to sync with my scan, as the lighting wasn’t so severe. This project was a very interesting and mind boggling experience, one that I thought would end in a huge disaster when the software I was using couldn’t recognize points of interest I needed. Though I managed to get back on track, and this whole process made me realize that in this line of work things aren’t always going to go your way, and that you’re going to come across certain issues like this in which you will have to start over and continue with what you were going to do in the first place. Technical issues and unexpected errors are always going occur; you just accept them and get back to work.

Good Old After Effects

Bringing in my TARGA sequence and my mov file to After Effects was probably the easiest step in this whole process, as I have a good understanding of how the program works in comparison to Maya where my skills are limited to a certain extent. I then layered up both files, giving it a slight green tint in colour correction. Next I added a TV simulator effect, in an attempt to replicate Princess Leah's hologram look in Star Wars - A New Hope. After playing around with the grading, and reversing the some of the footage, for playback reasons, I was ready to render out the complete video.

Another Update

After constantly moving my obj file and constantly changing its attributes so that it matched my video footage correctly, without moving away from the specific point of interest, I was able to correctly position both files of my composition correctly. All that was left to do was export the mov file from Maya into a TARGA sequence, and then layer that sequence with the mov file in After Effects.

Updates

After tracking my footage, and setting all the correct geometric points, I then had to bring my footage into Maya and bring my Kinect scan in so I could merge the two together correctly. Thus making the scan look 3d in my hands. At first the footage I attempted to use was terrible, and as you can see below the lighting and quality of the footage was just poor. I then re-shot the footage, making sure none of the issues I faced with the last video appeared this time round, such as lighting – which was a major issue as boju got confused by the intense light rays in the first piece of footage.