Focusing the Autofocus:
The a Autofocus group in the first level of the Custom Settings menu contains a variety of advanced autofocus options. This chapter details options that can be used to frame moving subjects at sporting events: a1 (AF-Cpriority selection), a3 (Dynamic AF area), and a4 (Focus tracking with lock-on). These options are best used with the focus mode selector rotated to C (continuous-servo AF) and the AF-area mode selector rotated to I (dynamic-area AF).
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Before we get into Photoshop I’m going to present to you an idea of what layers are about. If we take a layer of thin glass, and paint a pattern onto it, we can think of it as a single layer! Here you can see that we’ve painted a nice red rectangle onto our sheet of glass. If we put a paint a second (new) sheet of glass with a green circle on it, and place it over the first sheet, where we haven’t painted will show through the second sheet of glass (i.e. we will see the red square).
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A BrickMap is a good way to speed up your render times if you have a complicated environment that also has a moving camera shot. By creating a BrickMap you no longer have to calculate the occlusion on each frame;it simply references the BrickMap file. You will want to wait to create a BrickMap pass until you have finished modeling your set,as you can’t make any adjustments or changes to your set once you create the BrickMap,or else you will have to re-create it.
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This tutorial covers ways to create a terrain and control a flow of particle moving on the terrain in Virtools. Textured dunes: download at http://www.tinkering.net/sciviz/terraindune.cmo The landscape is created With Dune color, for texture and with Dune black-and-white, for displacement map. Please note that the pictures can be created in Photoshop or from a digital camera. You can use the same image for a texture and for a displacement map. You may end up using a black and white image for the displacement map because sometimes you want to have more control over the topography.
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Moujou is a plug-in for Maya which allows you to access the powerful automatic tracking of boujou from within the Maya workspace. It is very easy to use – just load your image sequence and click on the ‘Track it’ button. The results will be delivered straight into your current scene using standard Maya components and there is no need for any further refinements before the track is useable. Image-based masks can be imported to guide the tracking. They can be used to hide areas of the image that may be causing problems, or to help track moving objects such as cars or trucks. Any black and white image can be used as a mask. Camera path smoothing is also available to fix any spikes or noise in the camera path.
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