I was wondering how I could place a CG ball rolling down a sidewalk say if I have the real world footage shot and want to import it into Blender. I know about the wrold texturing and importing footage and selecting number of frames to use as my animation. However when I render , I see nothing. When I try this with a still photograph, I can see it in the render. What am I doing wrong with actual footage though. Im on a MAC so is this some weird MAC thing. Im running Blender 2.41, 2.37, 2.37a. If any one knows how I can do this please let me know. Greatly appreciate it.
I’m far from an expert but I can think of two ways to do this:
1- create a mesh plane in the background of your ball. Apply an “image” texture to your plane and use your movie clip as the image for your texture. You won’t see the movie while you model your marble but it will show up int he final render. I just asked how to see the movie while I model in another thread - Dwarven Fury responded with:
"Try this: Add a cube and add your movie as a texture to the cube. (Enable all the frames for the video under the Texture tab for the cube.) Now put this cube on a layer that you will never see. Now go into your camera’s view, and then hit the View button on the toolbar and tell it background image, and select your video texture. This should let you view the video in the background from your camera’s perspective. "
It worked well - I could see the movie, frame by frame, in my camera view window. I did not try to render this though because I overlay my animation on my home video by another method…which brings us to…
2- if you have a NLE for your video camera work, you can do a green screen kind of thing with your marble animation. Put a mesh plane behind your marble screen that takes up the entire backdrop during the animation. Make the plane pure green - no other colors in the mix. You need to get shadows off the green plane and make the green plane not react to light. From the materials screen for the plane, click the ‘shadeless’ button. Now, you can render this out using NTSC format into an AVI. With my set up at home, I have to go one step further because Blender does this at 30FPS but NTSC should be 29.97fps. My NLE (Studio 9 plus) doesn’t like the 30fps. So, I bring the AVI into Studio (it gripes but click on okay) and re-render out to a new AVI file - it will now be at 29.97. Now, you can pull your sidewalk video into your NLE as the main video track and then bring in your animation as an overlay track. Use chromatool to get rid of the green screen in your animation and render.