Greetings dear readers, it's time to write a new and my first blog post on the Autodesk Community Voices. For about half a year we worked on a big project, thanks to which I increased my knowledge and gained a new experience. Preparing and filming. Planning the process of creating visual effects and attention to a huge amount of detail.
Here I will talk about the creation of small videos for an architectural company that wanted to see the residential complex from all sides and place it on the ground. It is necessary to use material captured using a drone in this case
The amount of work was quite large. I had never used any of the tools before and had to learn them urgently. But thanks to the handy documentation for Autodesk products, the learning process was easy. Particular attention was paid to combining 3D visualization with video since the model of the residential complex was pre-modeled, I was faced with the task of creating an animation based on camera movement, creating an artificial forest, and cleaning the frames from unnecessary objects and elements.
- Key stages of creating plans with a residential complex:
- Capturing the movement of the camera and objects (Matchmoving, object tracking);
- Clearing frames from unnecessary elements (clean up);
- Editing the model of a residential complex;
- Forest simulation in the background;
- Animation rendering;
- Compositing and output for editing;
Camera motion capture was done with 3D tracking software. A feature of creating a motion capture camera is the preparation and the need to examine the place where the video was shot, and in our case, it is the territory of the open market and garages. Once the positions and distances between all the key points have been determined, it will be much easier with the tracking program to reconstruct and obtain the geometry of key elements such as buildings, trees, cars, etc.
However, the residential complex model was prepared in advance by architects and visualization specialists, it contained many errors that prevented it from being integrated into the prepared scene with camera animations.
This wasn't related to the scale of the scene, but on the contrary, many questions were raised by the 3D model, which had a non-optimized geometry. However, what is good for 3ds Max is completely unsuitable for working in Maya. Unlike 3ds Max, Maya's core is much better at handling large numbers of objects, meaning there is no need for artists to merge geometry.
The resulting model was presented as one object. This added an extra step to correct and fix all the errors. The detailing of the model was very high, and elements that are not visible in the distance were excluded and removed from it, which greatly facilitated the work.
The model is separately prepared for visualization using V-Ray. In architectural rendering, Corona Renderer is popular, but my workflow is built entirely in Maya and V-Ray for Maya, which required converting Corona Renderer materials and textures to V-Ray materials and textures, and some elements that cannot be rendered by means V-Ray for Maya were baked as separate texture maps and added to new materials.
Maya was the best for creating the forest model. In 3ds Max, we use plug-ins quite often, which are very functional and can solve many tasks, but this will require additional time to learn and access the tools. Maya has two powerful tools that can be combined to make the most of system resources. These tools are XGen and MASH.
While XGen is great at creating vegetation and hair models, MASH is excellent at creating copies of geometry that are governed by certain rules and patterns. What should we draw textures for densities and transformation? Of course, we will.
After tracking the movement of the camera and reconstructing the area, a geometry was obtained that covered the area of the garages.
Given the peculiarities of creating clones of objects, you need to correctly distribute copies over the surface. To create copies of trees and a variety of transformations, the MASH toolkit was used.
In conclusion, I want to summarize that many stages of the creation of this project made it possible to better understand the integrated approach to the use of various hardware and software solutions. The Autodesk 3ds Max package helped with building models and quadcopter flight planning over the set. AutoCAD drawings are always an important tool in model creation and building BIM models from Revit are easily transferred to the 3ds Max workspace and prepared for rendering. Autodesk Maya has a rich set of rigging and animation tools, and integration with leading 3D tracking and compositing applications allows you to create the highest quality animations and visual effects in a short time.
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