All Right so I’ve been working on this for a while and now I think I almost have it all ready. The Idea is to plug a video into blender and have blender (using compositing nodes) turn a tube of PVC piping being held by someone, into a lightsaber. Glow and everything.
It goes like this.
Take a lightsaber’s length of PVC piping and wrap or spray paint it a color that is guarenteed not to show up in the enviroment where you are recording the video. (It is NOT the color your lightsaber will be in the end. You can pick that how you like later!)
2.Make a handle for the PVC.
3.Record the video.
Now the idea here is to get blender to find that color you chose for the PVC piping, and replace it will a glow supplied by the compositing nodes.
I took a render of this cube.
After the render I used luminance to remove all of the red. And here are where the problems are incured.
I plug in this sequence of Compositing Nodes:
And get this result:
I Like it except I’m worried that if I try to plug it into a video, the colors outside of the PVC Piping will be distorted. I believe that this is caused by possibly a misuse of the luminance node?
I can’t test it with video right now, but if some one else could and would post it I would really appriciate it.
Also, If anyone has any comments or suggestions, I would REALLY appriciate it!
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and with the new Nodes in blender, I think it’s possible.
Just Imagine!!!
NO MORE ROTOSCOPING LIGHTSABER BLADES!!!
It just needs to be perfected.
Please help me get this right!
I think you may be better off using the Difference Key node - you can specify the colour you wish to remove exactly. Useful hint - passing it through several Difference Key nodes with slightly different colours specified gives you much better results than choosing one colour and cranking up the tolerances!
I’ll do a quick vid with some neoon colored paper when I get home and see how well it works then.
I’ll upload the vid with results then. If everything works out well, I can go ahead and set up a quick tut on how to do the lightsaber set up.
Thanx for the tip indigomonkey!
I just realized. I can use a time node to effect the blur values. This means that in a video, You get a really cool looking flicker effect like you see in the Star Wars videos. Also, this composition (when its finished) should allow for just about any glow effect in live video. It doesn’t have to be a lightsaber. Anybody who has tried rotoscoping can see how this could be useful. I’ll try to get a video up later tonight with an example. If I don’t run into any stupid problems then things should be fine. I’ve got an idea on how to apply this to full color video now.
OK, I’ve Run into a problem. I can’t seem to get blender to accept the video. For some reason It just won’t take it. It’s an MPEG video. I’ve converted it to .avi, .wmv, and .mov. It just doesn’t seem to want it!
Any Suggestions?
Allright I’ve loaded a rendered .mov file and that went in fine but now I have a problem where I can’t seem to record the composite. Does anyone know how to do this?
I’ve got the composite set up, All I need to do now is export the composite as a video.
???
As you can see the blade flickers from purple to blue and back again. I know why this is and that will be fixed in the next video.
The next video will be of a live video shot.
Unfourtunatly, My camcorder is not working right now. So…
If someone could upload a video for me to plug into my .blend that would be great.
Here’s what would need to be in it:
A moving object of a color unique to the video.
This means that the object has to be a color that shows up no where else in the video.
Otherwise part of your background will look very weird indeed.
Once the video is plugged into my compositer, The unique color is selected by the user, and the compositer makes anything of that color, a cool looking plasmaish object.
C&C Welcome!!
I"VE GOT IT!! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5092104896678817899
Allright here it is. I took a video of some dude waving around a green ball, and I plugged it into my compositer. Voila!! Plasma Ball!!!
It needs to be cleaned up just a little bit, but all in all I like how well it composited automaticly.
Let me know what you think.
Can do. The only thing I would like to say is that I reserve the right to use this setup for the composition contest.
That said… http://www.filefactory.com/file/e6546c/
I have had just a slight amount of problem on getting the Glow to overlay the original video without darkening the video.
The composite should work with any video and any color.
If small blotches appear in your video, change your difference key settings and increase the blur on the inverted matte.
This should mostly eliminate blotches.
Well, when people use sticks or pvc pipes, the image can often not catch the blade at all…its blurred and hard to see. I have a feeling the computer would have problems with this.
I figured that if I can get my camcorder working, My cam is high quality. It will do video at highspeeds. I’m going to try it and then I’ll put it up here.
