sound

i have begun to source my sound for the piece as i now know the majority will be the spitfire engine which i believe to be the rolls royce merlin engine. this sound is unique and iconic so it has to be done right or not done at all ......

consistency

so i have decided to render out a whole load of footage for the spitfires fly over as the cuts jump back and forth between the approaching 3d element and the original footage, so to keep the speed and position consistent it is necessary to edit it as a whole and simply crop the unnecessary footage. this will make the overall shot much more precise and more believable.

now were getting somewhere

so after the last couple of days iv been able to get some decent work done surrounding the newly developed sequence. the flow of the edit is much better and provides a better grounding for the 3d elements, im really looking forward to how this project turns out as im sure it will be brilliant. the initial establishing shots of the spitfires have come out well although im not too sure about the amount of motion blur added so i might need to kick that back a bit. there was also aproblem with consistency of placement and speed of the planes.

problems

so my second shot involves a long camera track and sweep upwards previously this shot was thought to be ok and unnecessary to track as the cg element would be in the distance and in the sky. but alas there was no such luck and the shot was in need of tracking. so i attempted to use maya live to resolve the problem, only to introduce many more problems. the footage is to sparse and void of any trackable information not to mention the reduced quality of the footage just to get it to play in maya. so after introducing over 30 track points and seeing full green bars i went to solve only to have the green bars turn to red and the pixel slip to 340 ?? baring in mind the ideal slip is 2. so tracking was out of the option.

so i then tried to remove the problem scene and introduce new footage to no avail.
so my resolution is to source new footage and provide a new narrative.

as such now my scene will consist of a more concise narratve in which the spitfires are the main focus. this new footage provides simpler elements of visual effects but overall will be a much better piece of work

first shot

first shot progress

so this shot here shows the blimp model flying behind the tree line. done by simply rendering out as a targa sequence and then composited in after effects by duplicating the original footage and then colour keying out the sky. easy and works well

i have also included a shader within this render, rendering out the maya scene twice: once with the texture and second with the shader, then parented to each other in after effects and then bled together through opacity to overlay both renders.

progress

so here are the textured models of a Blimp and a Spitfire. the models were pretty simple and hopefully work well in the final piece