Animating The Scenes

 

After finally creating workable tracked scenes. I then opened these in Maya and began to add my animation objects.

 

 

 

Pacman's mouth flap is animated using an additional copy of the object with the mouth open. To make the flaps animate I used the blend shape tool which would animate the difference between these 2 objects. I only had one of the objects on display, whilst the other was invisible.

 

 

Shot 1 was fairly easy to animate. To make Pacman & the Ghost appear as if they're coming out of the computer screen, I simply animated the objects to move through the plane which projects the video. The only problem I had with the tracking was that the camera would move sideways as it moved back. I felt the best way to save time was to move the characters forward at an angle would make characters to appear to move in a straight line.

 

 

Shot 2 was much more complicated as the tracking left some wobbly tracking. I decided to manually re-position the camera back into place when it went off track. This was quite a time taking process. The pellets were useful as a guide for where the camera needed to be placed in the incorrect frames. The ghost in this scene has another copy which is invisible until pacman eats the power pellet, making him bigger and the ghost turning blue making the current red version invisible on the same position.

 

 

Shot 3 was very simular to shot 1 but just pacman moving back into the screen. The tracking worked better on this scene, so Pacman was able to move in a straight line easier.

 

 

 

Lastly to correctly light up the objects to appear as though they belong to the scene. I placed spot lights in the same positions that I did from originally filming the scenes. Then I added area lights above for the ceiling lights. To also give a reflective light from the surface, I used another area light on the path with a slight tint of the counter's colour. To make the shadows visible I inserted planes within the scene, textured with 'use background' which makes these objects invisible, whilst allowing shadow.

 

Here's how the animated scenes will look before being composited and blended into the video.