Camera Tracking and DVSP
Here is an update on my first blog entry, Google Earth, SketchUp, 3ds Max, and explains how we used helicopter video footage and CAD models to produce a fly thru visualization.
Once our team had agreed on the general helicopter flight path and points of interest, we sent up the chopper to start filming. Unfortunately for me, the quality of the video wasn’t that great. The only camera available to us was an old police video camera mounted on the belly of the helicopter. It could only record a 640x480 movie on miniDV tape - don’t do this!! Garbage in garbage out! I would highly recommend that you don’t use anything lower than 720x486 if your target platform is going to be television. Lower quality video will not only make the end result look sub par but will also affect the camera tracking quality. Also, it’s best to use a CCD chip camera instead of a CMOS chip camera. Again, tracking quality may be sacrificed.
Anyway, I was given a huge 400MB Quicktime movie of the flightpath. I then brought this clip into Syntheyes (http://www.ssontech.com/) which analyzed the footage and generated 2D and 3D points which then solved a 3D camera for me. I won’t go into the details of the magic of Sytheyes but will tell you that it’s truly amazing software. It does other fancy things too like: color corection, stabilization, lens distortion removal, etc. Check out some of the tutorial movies here: http://www.ssontech.com/learning.htm.
It took me awhile to figure out how to align the Syntheyes scene to my MAX scene. Also, camera tracking is notorious for taking a long time to calculate. In my case, it had to process over 7000 frames which took hours to solve. Since I only had low quality footage I had to tweak and filter many things to get it somewhat smooth.
From Syntheyes, I exported my solved camera and points to a 3DSMAX format(a MAXScript .ms file). I then ran the .ms file in my MAX/DVSP scene and suddenly I was looking thru the Syntheyes generated camera! From here it was reletively easy to render an image sequence from that camera. You need to use a file type like PNG or TGA that has an alpha channel. I then merged my footage and my rendered out MAX scene in my video editing package, Sony Vegas 8 Pro. Once inside the NLE I then started to make travelling masks, titles, and last minute color adjustments. It doesn’t matter which video package you end up using but I wouldn’t do a project like this without the ability to use masks. I cannot emphasize this enough. Vegas Pro was barely good enough for this project. Next time I would use Combustion or After Effects for this.
I used Sony’s Cinescore to generate a royalty free soundtrack which I also brought into the Vegas timeline. From Vegas I exported the final composition to DVD(mpeg2) and WMV formats because my client wanted to play the final product on a DVD player, stream from the Web, and play on Broadcast television. Here is the final movie on Vimeo (which I also highly recommend for free video hosting):
http://www.vimeo.com/1488512
password: SR179
Overall, I was pleased with the outcome. I only wish the video quality had been better. Dynamite VSP was an invaluable tool for the management of plants, signs, walls, rails, cars, road markings, and many other things that are needed for a big project like this. The combination of DVSP with Syntheyes is a great way to offer your clients a realistic view of what that new highway or road will look like without having to model the surrounding enviroment.
Comments
If you want to import surfaces from Civil 3D into Dynamite VSP, you’ll need our free Civil 3D plugin which handles the export process for you.
You can download it from here:
http://www.3am-solutions.co.uk/community/tools/category/C46/
Do you use civil 3D?? if can you bring a surface in from vault with vsp?
thanks
Keith