Match Moving and Compositing Pipeline in Maya and After Effects
In this tutorial, we'll learn how to take some footage and move it through the entire MatchMover to Maya to After Effects pipeline to create a finished shot. Software required: Maya 2011, After Effects CS4.
What you'll learn
In this tutorial, we'll learn how to take some footage and move it through the entire MatchMover to Maya to After Effects pipeline to create a finished shot. By going through the entire pipeline, we will be able to learn about specific issues and tips and tricks while moving between and inside each application. We'll begin this tutorial by solving four of our shots in MatchMover and combining them in Maya into a cohesive 3D scene. Then we'll create our last camera in Maya and match it. Once all our camera are set up, we'll learn how to model our object, create dynamics, animate, texture and render our scene. We'll then jump into After Effects to do some color treatment on our backgrounds and then composite our layers together. Now, this is a long project that will take some time to complete. If you get stuck or have any questions, please join our forums and ask. We check the forums often and have a very active and helpful community. Software required: Maya 2011, After Effects CS4.
Table of contents
- Examining the Shots and the Footage 4m
- Creating a Plan to Keep Our Shots Consistent for Maya 8m
- Manually Tracking Shot Two 11m
- Manually Tracking Shot Three 6m
- Manually Tracking Shot Four 8m
- Creating the Coordinate System for Shot Four 3m
- Manually Tracking Shot Five 8m
- Integrating Our Various Match Moves into One Scene 8m
- Continuing to Integrate Our Shots Together in Maya 6m
- Creating Low-quality Previews in Composite for Use in Maya 7m
- Offsetting Our Cameras and Image Planes to Play Correctly 6m
- Hand-matching a Camera Inside Maya 10m
- Matching the Table Orientation on Shot One Camera 11m
- Constraining a Preview Camera to Move with Our Shots 8m
- Testing Our Match Move Inside Maya and Fixing Any Issues 10m
- Modeling the Pyramid Asset 9m
- Extruding and Beveling Our Pyramid 8m
- Modeling the Interior of the Pyramid 8m
- Animating the Pyramid Sliding Across the Table 12m
- Animating the Pyramid Opening 11m
- Creating Emitters for Our nParticles 8m
- Animating the Emitters in Sync with the Doors Opening 5m
- Adding Newton and Drag Forces to Draw Our Particles into the Air 8m
- Keeping Our Nparticles in the Pyramid and Creating a Vortex 7m
- Creating the Goal Models for Our Particles 8m
- Animating the Goals on and Off to Create the Transitions 10m
- Using a Gravity Force to Create Falling Particles 8m
- Caching Our Particles and Instancing Geometry 9m
- Bringing in Our HDR Image for Indirect Lighting 7m
- Adding Direct Lighting Sources 6m
- Creating a Material for Our Pyramid 11m
- Using Projection Techniques to Vary Particle Color by Distance 10m
- Animating the Particle Projection to Stay with Our Particles 8m
- Animating the Particle Ramp and Beginning Our Table Shader 5m
- Creating a Clean Plate and Reflection Map for Shot One 8m
- Projecting Our Reflection Map Onto Our Geometry 8m
- Setting up Basic Render Passes and Layers 4m
- Changing Our Ambient Occlusion Pass for the Best Results 7m
- Choosing the File Type and Frame Buffer for Compositing 6m
- Rendering with Multiple Cameras and Fixing the Preview Cam 6m
- Overriding Render Layers to Render Each Camera Separately 9m
- Creating a Layer to Output a Particle Matte Pass 4m
- Creating the Reflection Height Shader and Pass 10m
- Doing Final Checks on Render Settings and Batch Rendering 6m
- Dealing with Mental Ray 'Out of Memory' Errors 3m
- Color Correcting Our Shots for Consistency in After Effects 7m
- Using the Exposure and Curves Effects to Color Correct Shot Two 6m
- Fixing Shot Three with Color Correction and Keying Effects 10m
- Reusing Color Correction Effects to Save Time on Shot Four 8m
- Tracking the Table and Beginning the Color Correction in Shot Five 6m
- Using a Luma Keyer to Finish Shot Five 8m
- Setting up Our Project and Using Extractor Effects 5m
- Combining Our Basic Color Passes and Precomping 4m
- Combining Passes to Create a Proper Foreground Alpha 4m
- Using Our Clean Plate to Fix the Shot One Background 4m
- Adding the Reflection to Our Background 7m
- Cutting out the Reflection and Combining It Correctly 8m
- Lightwrapping and Blurring to Composite with Background 8m
- Adding AO to the Background and Masking the Foreground 7m
- Adding DOF Using Lens Blur and Using Minimax to Fix Edges 11m
- Adding Motion Blur Using Our Motion Vector Pass with RSMB 9m
- Fixing the Background Ambient Occlusion and the Blurred Mask 5m
- Using Keying Techniques to Fix Depth in Shot Two 9m
- Creating an Expansive Ground Shadow Using Existing Images 6m
- Removing the Visible Markers Using Our Own Setup 7m
- Using the Particle Matte to Color Correct Our Particles 5m
- Adding Shot Two Motion Blur and Fixing Our Blurs to Finish Shot Two 7m
- Converting Shot Two to Shot Three and Fixing Various Issues 8m
- Cleaning the Background with Masking and Layering Techniques 5m
- Converting Shot Three to Shot Four and Fixing Depth Blurs 7m
- Using the Tracker to Remove Our Markers 8m
- Converting Shot Four to Shot Five and Fixing Alpha Issues 8m
- Fixing the Reflections by Manually Masking Our Layers 9m
- Making Last Minute Color Correction Tweaks and Fixing Mattes 10m
- Removing the Shadow in Shot Three and Viewing Our Final Shots 5m
About the author
Along with creating and recording training, he also used to manage the support team and work closely with the production development team at Digital-Tutors, now a Pluralsight company. He began his career working freelance and quickly realized that he wanted to find a company where he could use his talents to help people succeed in the CG industry. Chris has likely watched more Pluralsight creative training than anyone on the planet, and its evidenced by his Einstein-sized brain and encyclopedic... more