Originally
posted by
Surferminn:
Originally posted by
feldon23:
Putting 3D objects on top of a 2D movie has not been done very often. The best example that comes to mind is the Final Fantasy VII game.
Was "Who Killed Roger Rabbit" a 3D/2D movie? Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (originally Who Censored Roger Rabbit?) was a film. It was a combination of 2D footage + 2D hand-drawn cel animation + some 3D animation and computer effects. It was played in theaters on a standard projector.
Final Fantasy VII was computer game that, in real-time, using all the processing capability of the 1997 Playstation hadware, to keep a 2D movie in synch with 3D objects on top. This included changing camera angles and camera dollies, pans, etc. There are also transitions between 2D prerendered movies and 2D still images (typically framegrabs of the movie). The 1997 Playstation hardware was only capable of playing 320 x 240 video and only generating 180,000 lit polygons per second. It was a technical tour de force when it came out.
What Jim has to do is somehow mesh his 2D movie of the anemone with 3D rendered tentacles seamlessly overlaid on top. The clownfishes need to seem to interact with the anemone.
Jim has a few technical hurdles:
- Display this movie without bloating the filesize of the Aquarium dramatically. Use of optimized video codecs such as MPEG-4 will help.
- Seamlessly loop the video. As the tentacles of a moving anemone have no discernable pattern, this will probably be a nightmare. I would imagine a traveling "matte" being used to composite parts of the video onto itself to take advantage of loop-like trends in different parts of the animation. In other words, if the upper left part has a distinctive loop and the bottom right has a distinctive loop, but these do not have the same timing, then cropping the left part and right part and then recompositing on a different time scale along with speedup/slowdown would allow the loops to line up.
- Finally, he has to create 3D tentacles which look indistinguishable from the filmed specimens. They need to move similarly and be able to "interact" with the clownfishes without significant passthrus.
It is an unenviable job to be sure.