Compositing 3d sword into live action

I am working on compositing a 3d sword into a live action sequence. But I am having real trouble with a few things. First is the lighting/reflectivity of the blade of the sword. So that the lade reflects light from the sun and partially reflects the surroundings. I can never get it to look right.

Second is the tracking of the blade; I am currently using the hilt and the handle of the sword as a reference. After actually rendering out the AVI from blender I plan on rotoscoping the video to make a better match between the CG blade and the live action sword hilt.

I have uploaded the entire project and it is rather large about 50MB.

download it here: www.tyndanproductions.com/offtopic/CGSword.zip

If there is anyone out there who could help me get the lighting etc correct and tell me how to set everyhting up, or even give me the modified .blend file I would be greatly appreciative. What I really need is a way to load up any video. Set up the the lighting and track the sword and have it render out fairly nice, as close to realistic as possible. Please help me I am no good with 3D work.

This is for an extremely low budget (but hopefully very high quality) independent film I am working on, which is currently in preproductions. So I would give Visual Effects credit to the person who can make it look right, and anyone who can make it look awsome I would probably ask to do more 3D visual effect for me if they wanted.

I managed to ge the lighting and textures correct, but now that I think about it I have another problem: I don;t know how to do textures on top of textures, for example have the sword blade, with its reflection and whatnot, but then also have a blood texture on the blade that covers up the texture below it, with all its shinyness.

I am still ripping my hair out with the whole motion tracking issue. Here is an xample of some tracking I did although it looks okay it was extremely time consuming. Forgive the lighting and non realistic look of the CG blade, but this is a work in progress:

http://www.tyndanproductions.com/offtopic/CGSword.wmv

Can anyone possibly think of a way for me to match the movements correctly?

Overall I am looking to eventually replicate this CG sword work:

http://www.paulcampion.com/texturing/LOTR1lurtzHead.html

for the blood texture on the map to tab play around with the alpha button

So it is a simple as making an alpha layer? I guess that makes sense. I’m still kinda learning blender as a tool. Before I used anim8or, and I stll use it for modeling, but blender materials still kinda confuse me. By the way I’ve made some progress in making the CG blade. It is a very short clip, because I was more worried about reflection mapping and matching then motion matching, but check it out here in 3 speeds. It is still not perfect but it is getting there:

http://www.tyndanproductions.com/offtopic/CGSwordFinal.wmv

I’m actually getting excited about the possibilities. I’ve got to get adept and HDR probes now… =) and I can make this look really nice. For anyone who has not downloaded the original project I have the handle and hilt of a sword, and a 3 inch section of the blade, but the rest of the blade has been cut off. In its place is a CG blade and I did my best to match the look and motion of the blade as it is moved. I used vector blur etc to make it look pretty nice, but i am still a newbie at Blender so I hope this is not a bad first attempt.

Hey. This project tickles my fancy. I’ve been attempting this myself for a while exept I’ve been tracking my sword to an empty hand because I don’t have a sword hilt like you do. I also have been trying out arrow compositing but haven’t had to much luck with that. good job with what you have. I can’t wait to see what it looks like finished. Also the footage in the download is kind of messed up. It’s all liney

It may seem liny if you are not using the most up to date Windows media codec. I am not seeing any lines on the video. Try re-downloading it.

I’d also like to note that the image is partially rotoscoped where the CG blade meets the Hilt, in order to reduce jagged lines and make is seem more realistic. Not that important, but worth mentioning that this is not a render straight out of Blender, but is definatly done with the excellence of Blender.

Oh and ahem I also used digital grading for colors… but other then that it was all Blender… (and anim8or for modelling)

hmm. I’m not sure whats wrong because the 2 test scenes that you have don’t have odd lines but the one in the project file does. It might be my codec because I downloaded it again.

Oh I see the one in the blender package I uploaded first. That video was deinterlaced, you shouldn’t have odd lines can you post a screen shot or something?

here it is.

Attachments


That looks liek a corrupted video file. I have no idea what to tell you It works fine for me, even from the download. =/

Oh well. I still can’t wait to see your progress even though I can’t practice myself.

Maybe you still can, go out and buya cheap sword and cut off the blade. works pretty easily. then just use the cut off blade as a reference for modeling it in 3D.

I found a cool article you may like
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=1909

For tracking things like a sword or lightsaber, it may be easier to attach a long, thin stick to the hilt. With only the relatively small hilt as reference, you risk of making the blade wobble, so having a stick as reference is more stable. Of course, if you need to stab someone, the stick would need to be retractable or short enough. I think they did it this way in the Star Wars movies.

In Troy they only used the handle. The scene in the beginning where Achilles stabs the guy between the shoulder blades