Tetris Attack

[WolfieMario]

I've started learning 3D graphics with Blender, and I decided to use it when I did my final project for filmmaking class. Of course, that meant learning how to combine 3D and real life as well.

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The point was not to have much plot, so I did the first thing that came to mind. Unfortunately, this meant many hours of work for the not-so-simple effects. I know I'm no James Cameron, but it's pretty good for a first try at mixing 3D and real life, right?

Also, I know it's not perfect, as my tracking was slightly off at points, and there are some minor continuity errors as well. You also may think my masking is flawed at some parts, but hey, if you'd be trying to pen-tool an outline of your friend's body thirty times for every second of video, you'd make quite a few mistakes as well (and not to mention start to hate your friend for never keeping still :P)

[dsavi]

Camera tracking, lighting, and color correction were off, some places more than others, (What program did you use to camera track, or did you just animate all the camera movements in Blender?) but for a first try I can say that you certainly put in a lot of effort.

 

What version of Blender are you using?

 

As a tip for next time, try lighting the objects in Blender as they would be lit in real life, (Position the light sources in the scene in the same places as they were placed in real life) and also try learning about lighting (I would start here, and then go here) so that you know how to light the real life and Blender scenes. You should also look into color correcting your real life footage, a lot of shots were overexposed. But like I said, overall, for a first try, very good.

[unknowz]

I would suggest steadying your camera before anything else.

 

Not bad though, especially for a first try.

[WolfieMario]

@dsavi: Thanks for those links - I already knew about how to do basic lighting in Blender, but the second one is great as I never knew how lighting is set up in professional films :-o

Also, I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to even get the 3D to work at first that I didn't think of lighting at all. But I was stupid to not go back later and rerender the scenes to fix it #-o

I did try to make the bricks match the surroundings a bit in the scene where he stands and looks at his blockaded door, but I did that by keying out the bricks, making a colorized desaturated bluish layer of the bricks visible underneath, and setting that to 35% with another copy of the original beneath it. So I never actually went back to Blender to do any real lighting work like I should have, because I didn't want to wait for the long render times again.

I used Voodoo to do the tracking, and I didn't understand Blender's keyframing system well enough back when I did most of this (I had to meet the deadline of the last day of classes because it was a final project, but now in the summer I added a new scene (where the door is blocked) as well as the intro and ending animations, and I redid all scenes of the Tetris game on the computer screen in Blender (rather than the original shots, which came from a Tetris NES rom. I don't want to risk any copyright strikes for that :XD:)). If I understood keyframing in Blender better at the time, I would have used the empty that the camera is packaged in by Voodoo to manually correct the places where tracking was off, so it wouldn't be so bad at parts as it is. Also, I don't know how the hell I failed so bad at the scene where he's walled in by blocks and he tries to run out in a first-person perspective. The clips right before and after that were good, but that shot came out awful :???:. Anyways, I'm using Blender 2.5 Alpha 2, although I had to use Blender 2.49 to import and execute the Python script that generates the animated camera and mesh cloud, because Voodoo exports in an older version of Python that refuses to work with Blender 2.5+. I still did all my animating in 2.5 Alpha 2, because I like the intuitive interface layout better.

Also, I was wondering if you could tell me, does Blender 2.52 crash for you whenever you attempt to bake a material's texture/shading? I guess I can just pull my objects into 2.49, bake them there, save the images to outside Blender, and pull them into the 2.5 file, since it at least has no problem marking seams and UV unwrapping in 2.5 :P. I just hope this is fixed once they finally get into the betas, because it's sort of a hassle. Oddly enough, I've seen posts from people saying it freezes for them too, but I saw a tutorial where it worked fine for someone using 2.5, but then again, he didn't specify if it was Alpha 1 or 2 :???:

Also, thanks for mentioning about the overexposure - that's something that never occurred to me, so when I make more real-life vids I'll have to keep that in mind. Of course, I'll also play around with my camera's own exposure settings before relying on using After Effects' color correction features, since I realize even virtual color correction won't cure the color clipping that results from overexposed or underexposed shots. It would be awesome if I had a 32 bit-per-channel camera and didn't have to worry about clipping, but do they even make those? :XD:

Anyways, I'll get more practice with this because my friend and I are going to be working on a short movie with people from our high school acting (it will be presented at the high school as well, with all proceeds going to charity), and he said it'll need 3D effects, so this time around I can actually set up my lighting right and correct errors in tracking. I'll also try to make the exposure better in the future :P

 

@unknowz: Well, sadly, my tripod is a piece of crap :XD:. I was supposed to get a good one, but some jerk stole it off our doorstep after it got delivered, before anyone got home. Also, some shots, such as the one where it pans from my friend after he hears the noise and then tilts down to show the block on the ground, and then over again to show the block falling on his desk, were really difficult to film in such a small room, with me sitting on his other desk and resting the tripod partially on my leg due to lack of space. In more open settings, it wouldn't have been so tough to keep the shot steady, and also, I probably need to grease my tripod or something :P

[dsavi]

(Can't give a full answer right now, as I'm traveling)

 

As it happens, Blender 2.5 went into beta within the last few hours of this post. I tried baking a full render on the default cube, forgot how to do it, and as it happened, it did crash. :razz: But I managed to do it correctly just two weeks ago, so I'm not too sure.

[WolfieMario]

Wait, where did they release the Beta? I checked here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Development/Roadmap

It says there's still some things left to do before the beta release can be finished. Also, it's not under the downloads or release logs :-?

[Shiny]

I'm loving the concept. I think it does look a bit rough, with the lighting and placing of blocks not quite right.

 

Good job, nevertheless.