Satisfied with the idea, I went off to shoot my video footage using my camera phone, then proceeded to matchmove using SynthEyes, and was happy enough to get a nice 3D camera solution. I downloaded a free mech model provided kindly by Michael Kingery (aka Legato895). I quickly rigged the mech model, started experimenting with a walk cycle, and finally merged the model into the 3D scene with the 3D camera solution I got earlier. Here is a viewport grab.
It was all pretty rainbow and butterflies thus far because I spent in total only around 2 weeks of on-and-off effort while teaching the VFX class (I can do this because all my students are now working on their own projects; I usually spend until lunch time directing them what to do next and have most of the time after lunch to work on this mini project). But then I realized I could not rely solely on shaders to get a good mech look. I needed some textures, hopefully with minimum effort. So I checked the UV unwrapping of the model and found nothing. The model was not UV unwrapped.
The pretty rainbow went away, bringing along with it all the butterflies.
The next 3 weeks, until today, I have been unwrapping the model piece by piece. I took such a long time because I am not a skilled UV unwrapper. Another reason is because the model was triangulated and it seems that 3DS Max Relax Tool for UV unwrapping works better with quads. Finally, the model itself has modeling quirks that make UV unwrapping more complicated. I found myself making minor modifications and cleaning ups just to make the unwrapping process easier. Right now I only have the feet left.
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| I use checker pattern to test my unwrapping. Notice only the feet has not been properly unwrapped. |
Let's see what I can do in the coming month :)
