Hi All

I’m still new to this program, so forgive me if this question is a stupid one.

I’ve done quite a few designs with Dynamite now, but they are mainly based on just draping aerials over a surface.

But what I’ve been asked to do now is show an animated, fixed view showing the proposed design with cars moving into and out of the view but with a photograph as a background.

Basically an animated photmontage.

What’s the best way to go about this?

Cheers

Curtis

Curtis,

Dependent upon your photo montage, you could use camera match to a) setup the still
b) obtain a photomontage of what one can see in 360 view of the site at a distance and that way vehicles wont travel through a plane which would be your photo montage.
It largely depends on what is required for your output and secondly is it a photo montage your after like what Mark Parkinson did for the freeway in South Africa or a proper animation.

Hi Mark

After further discussions with my boss, we are just looking for a still photomontage, with no animation.

In terms of the photographs all we have is the coords of where the photo was taken from and the direction.

Where do I find camera match, is this part of Viz or Dynamite.

And yes it’s a photomontage similar to the Freeway and also the one from the Netherlands with the bridge in the background.

I’ll have a go.

Cheers

Curtis

Curtis,

Camera match is part of Max I think its in Viz too, its been a longtime since I used Viz.
There is decent tutorials on vizdepot.com and evermotion.org although its not easy. Otherwise there is a book I have for Viz 2006 that has an example. Off hand the author’s surname start with an O. (sorry don’t have the book with me.) but you also need the use of photoshop for is vanishing point functionality.

Mark

Hi Curtis

Yes, VIZ does have the Camera Match capabilities. Look in the VIZ help under Camera Match Utility, to give a good description and step by step instruction on how to set up the Camera Match. It’s also worth looking at the VIZ Rendering tutorial > High-Resolution Renderings and Backgrounds > Using the Camera Match Utility and Using Camera Match with a New Image.

This method basically shows you how to place 3d CamPoints into your scene, and then assign the CamPoint positions to your photograph. BUT in my experience it is actually very difficult to get this Utility to work. The tutorial example works well, but on real projects it’s hard to get VIZ to create your camera. This is due to errors between the CamPoints and the points your pick on your photo.  It only takes a small error for it not to work. A quote from the VIZ help:

If there are errors and the camera cannot be created, readjust the point positions in 3D space, and reassign them to the bitmap. It’s easy to make a mistake doing either, but once you get it right the match should work.

What I end up doing is using the CamPoints and assigned positions to manually “rotate” the perspective view into position. This can take a bit of time and can be quite fiddly, but once done the results can be worth while.

I’ve never tried animating vehicles on my photo matches, but this could be done quite easily. The only problem is once I render out my “photo match” image from VIZ, I do post image editing on the rendered output to tidy it up. I basically cut pieces out of the original photo and paste onto photo match to try and give more realism. (This is because the 3d VIZ model is rendered on top of the photo, and sometimes you need the photo to sit “on top” of the rendered image. I hope this makes sense ??  I’ve attached a few examples to show what I mean.)

Good luck with your photo matching.

Cheers Mark P

Hi Mark

Those images are excellent.

So basically once you’ve completed the image you bring it into something like photoshop to edit/overlay the photograph, to remove parts of the design which pass behind buildings, etc.

Do you know where you can get some more vehicles from, I’m desperately looking for some heavy goods or haulage vehicles?

Cheers

Curtis

Did you check out the Links Section here on the Community Site?  Worth taking a look at http://www.archvision.com too - RPC content is compatible with DVSP.