creating silhouette animation in blender

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I have just downloaded blender3d and I wish to create the following:

  1. Create animated human (both genders) models.
  2. The models will be silhouetted.
  3. Composite them over avi footage. I need to know if I can insert them using alpha channels.

Is this a simple process? Hope you can help

2

It’s very possible and it’s a process, how simple depends on you.

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3

Concerning the silhouettes, make your humans, give them a ‘shadeless’ black material, make the background white, and save as PNG images either:

  1. with alpha channels. In the sequence editor, then use this alpha channel.

  2. without alpha channels. You can then use the colouring of the PNGs as an alpha map.

4

Can I extrapolate a 3d model from a photo (ie to obtain the shape of a person)?

5

Not in a single step. Do the sillouettes have to move (ie: change shape) or are they more like mannequins?

There’s a script you can add to Blender called MakeHuman (I don’t think it comes with the distro, someone check me on this one) that should produce figures easily adequate for shadows.

Have you considered shooting live actors against a green or blue background then processing the colours to produce the sillouettes ?

6

Yup. I think that that would be the best method. Looks like I was shunning some hard graft by fortuitously discovering a figure animation routine within blender or as a plugin / sample. Thanks for all your help.