‘The Skateshop’ – A PFTrack, Maya & AE Workflow, Day 1 – Premium Tutorial
plus

‘The Skateshop’ – A PFTrack, Maya & AE Workflow, Day 1 – Premium Tutorial

on Jul 8th 2010 with 11 comments
Tutorial Details

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

This entry is part 8 of 9 in the Best Of Maya Session
« PreviousNext »
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series ‘The Skateshop’

Set extension and/or CG integration with live action footage is a key aspect of Visual Effects work, and it’s our job as CG artists to ensure that we use a suitable workflow for the job at hand. In this detailed 3-day Premium tutorial series, Alvaro Castañeda shows us one possible workflow, moving from PFTrack for tracking, to Maya for modelling, texturing and rendering, and then compositing the result in Maya Composite, having used AE along the way! ‘The Skateshop’ is an unmissable tutorial for anyone looking to get into VFX. Can’t wait to get started? Become a Premium member, or learn more after the jump!

Breakdown of Day 1

Today we’ll start by processing the footage into something we can use throughout the whole process. We’ll then track the footage, and finish by importing it into our 3D application to help us build our 3D models.

Want to Join Plus?

The Tuts+ network runs a membership service called Premium. For $19 per month, you gain access to exclusive high quality screencast tutorials, downloadable content packs, and freebies at CGtuts+, Psdtuts+, Vectortuts+, Audiotuts+, Nettuts+ and Aetuts+! For less than the price of a movie, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business all month long!!. Become a Premium member today!

Don’t miss more CG Premium tutorials and content packs, published weekly – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.

 
Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Hi! I'm Alvaro Castañeda, best known as "varomix". I lost a little of my self back in 1993 at a Jurassic Park screening, and that totally changed my life. Toy Story finished the job in 1995 - there was no turning back! I started my way in 3D back in 1998, first using 3ds Max, then Cinema4D and finally in 1999, I met Maya 2.0. Since then I've done CGI for print, web, TV, Film, DVD, I guess anything that has pixels in it!  

Plus Premium
 
 
  • http://none Memn0n

    Woow, I wouldnt pay for that !

    Your tracking is off (Shaking and sliding) , the shadow you show in your breakdown totally disappears in the end, the integration in general doesnt really work.

    You should really put more energy in tweaking it to be perfect, especially for the tracking, before releasing it as a PREMIUM tutorial.

  • Karim

    preview looks weired… dont know why though. the buildings feels a bit flat :(

  • Wilfried

    This is a nodal camera move. Why do you need 3d tracking (PFTrack) for this? Wouldn’t a 2d point tracker suffice?

  • Stefan Frank

    Looks interesting! Like the textures and the style of this…will try this with another context.
    THX!

  • http://www.crulation.com Michiel

    The shadows and lighting dont seem to be visible and accurate. Add another AO pass with accuracy.

  • http://varomix.wordpress.com varomix
    Author

    Hi guys
    Thanks a lot for you comments.

    In the tutorial I give you the knowledge to tweak into you drop, this is not a button pushing tutorial, I try to teach you why stuff happens, so you can do more than this project, if this was for a client I would totally spend more time tweaking values, that why this is breakdown into passes and stuff, so you can get in there and tweak till you or your client is happy, I bet people that take this tutorial and really get the knowledge, can get far better results that I did, given you put the time into it.

    I was thinking about this last night actually, the total time of the tutorial is about 5 hours, real-time, no video speedups, I do everything on video, the only time I paused is on a retracking and on the render from Maya, everything else you see me doing it, man doing all this work in 5 hours is damn good if you ask me, if I could work like that fast in the studio I could sleep a lot more :D .

    Also, for people taking the tutorial, expect comments like this, this will be like the first pass, and this comments are the notes from your supervisor, yeah the track is a bit of, well, go fix it, is not the end of the world, yeah the shadow is a bit to light, well, since this is all in passes in my comp, is just a matter of moving a slider, easy, could this be solved with other tracking methods?, yes, was this hard to implement?, nop. could this workflow be used in other projects with a more complicated camera move?, yes, totally.

    I’ll say, focus on the knowledge and I bet you can be way better than me and I do really hope that happens and I hope some people can post their result and we can be amused and/or give them comments to improve their work.

    Thank you

  • Steve

    Regardless of whether the tutorial is or isn’t useful, one thing I’ve come to find on any Tuts+ site these days is immediate backlash for any given tutorial posted. To the point where it becomes fearful why anyone would take the time to write or produce a tutorial only to subject themselves to severe criticism. While it’s obviously not practical to fill a tutorial site with misinformation or simply plain bad production teachings, I fear that content to fills these kinds of sites will diminish as nobody wants weigh being ripped to shreds versus the time it takes to create a tutorial.

    Quality tutorials are what keeps these sites alive, but immediately killing someone without providing the answers to the techniques you think the tutorials are lacking is just plain stupid. Anyone can say something sucks, but adding to the tutorial versus tearing it down is the only way these sites will make any progress.

    • Chris

      I agree with Steve. Yes, the integration isn’t completely perfect. But it sounds like a solid tutorial that one could use to build their skills and produce better quality work.

      With the exception of a few atrociously horrible tuts on the tuts+ network recently (AI tut for the tennis girl) most of them are pretty solid and high quality tutorials. Taking the time to put together a tutorial can be daunting, especially when you have paid work to manage as well. Imagine trying to be an apprentice of a master designer and then criticizing every single piece of work he produces. You’d be out of a teacher quick.

    • Chris

      Totally agree. I hate reading the comments sometimes where it’s either “why is this premium”, “this should be free” or trying to be superior by nit picking. It’s a tutorial — not something delivered to you as a client. jeesh.

      I think this looks awesome and as a beginner in AE I’m sure I could take alot from it.

      • Memn0n

        Dont get me wrong,

        I really do appreciate people are taking time to do this kind of tutorial. And, I do believe a lot of people will find it very educative and learn a lot.

        But, what I was meant is this : having myself to matchmove on a regular basis for different project, I sometime have to re-track stuff that other people already worked on because they often had a bad result. When I open their scene, I see that they almost everytime used automatic tracking and deleted the most obvious bad auto-feature but often kept a lot of other bad auto-feature.

        I, personnaly, think it is really worth spending twice the time to explain how to do a VERY good and clean tracking in the first place. The reason is that, you can be the best compositer, if the tracking you use is slightly off, your shot just wont work !

        The other comment about the shadow is just something that disturbed me in the preview. You see the Shadow Pass, and then in the final shot you dont see any shadow (maybe because of it being too light + the youtube compression).

        I understand that the way I wrote my comment could have been misinterpreted into some kind of condescendant comment. But, I didnt mean to attack the author of this tutorial.

        As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go Premium, watch this tutorial and see what could have been done to quickly help the tracking part.

      • http://www.badgrenola.com Matt Brealey

        Thanks for coming back and giving clarification Memn0n – we really do appreciate constructive criticism! I’d love to hear what you think of the current Premium tutorials, and if you have any suggestions/wishes for future ones, feel free to let me know :)

        Cheers!

        Matt