DigiVFX
Digital Visual Effects, Spring 2018

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project #1
project #2
final project
assignments

project #3: MatchMove

Assigned: 2018/5/16
Due: 2018/6/6 2:00pm
submission, voting

Project description

Matchmove is a technique of estimating camera parameters from an input video sequence so that computer generated imagery (CGI) could be seamlessly inserted into the sequence. In this project, you will use tools to create visual effects using matchmove. You can either use camera calibration techniques or structure from motion methods. Essentially, for this project, you have to do the following things:
  • Shoot a video sequence. (Of course, you should plan ahead on how camera moves and what to insert afterwards.)
  • Apply a calibration or structure-from-motion tool to estimate camera parameters
  • Import these camera parameters into some 3D packages to add CGI into your scene
  • Optionally, add sound effects to your video and edit it.

Taking video

We will provide a camera for the students with no access to video camera. Please sign up here to borrow the camera.

MatchMove and rendering

If you prefer to use calibration approaches, you can either Bouget's matlab calibration toolbox (it is available in OpenCV too) or Zhengyoun Zhang's calibration program. However, to use this approach, you have to figure out how to insert CGI by yourself.

For structure from motion, there are many excellent commercial software. However, most of them are very expensive (around $5,000) which we can't afford to use in this class. In this project, we recommend to use Voodoo. It is a non-commercial tool. In case that you cannot download it there, try to find other links. Here is an official link. We take no responsibility to the link.

For inserting CGIs, we recommend that you use Blender to add CGI.

Here are the slides from last year's TA help session.(powerpoint version)

Submission

You have to turn in two videos, the raw footage before inserting CGI and the final composite video as your artifacts. Submission instruction will be posted later.