Matchmoving a shot with rain

Hi there. Haven’t been here in a while. I don’t think this is a beginner question but the professional and VFX supervisor forums are now private (how do you re-gain access to them?) so I guess there were some changes around here.
Anyways, on to the question. 🙂
We have a green screen shot where there needs to be rain. It can’t be digital rain because there’s an actor standing in the rain and the camera gets pretty close to him(close up) so you will see he is not wet and we need to see the water hitting him and bouncing of him and the drops etc. So it needs to be real water. The problem is it also needs to be a dolly shot, which will naturally need to be matchmoved and for that we need tracking marks. Tracking marks not only on the green screen but also in different depths and along the dolly path etc as you know. In a normal shot you just roto the tracks out when keying. But here you would also be rotoscoping the rain out leaving rainless holes in the image.
Question is, would adding digital rain on top mask the problem or would it still be visible? If a plate of digital rain to fill the the holes won’t work, what is the solution? Having tracking marks that can be keyed so they don’t need to be rotoscoped? If so it will make it all much harder as we normally use light stands and other things with cross stickers to them when we need depth marks for matchmoving shots.
Also, would the rain drops confuse the matchmove software making tracking a nightmare? Never done that type of shot before.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Bioluminescent Alien for Short Film. Best Options?

Hello,

I am new to the forums, and new to the world of CG artistry in general. I am currently working on a short film involving, as a central character, an Alien creature which exudes light through its scales, glowing from inside of its body. The producers and I have been discussing the best options for bringing this to life, and it was suggested I pose the question to these forums for a wider range of informed opinion.

We are debating the pro’s and con’s of either a) making the creature through practical make-up effects on an actor and either building lights into the make-up or adding them later in post, or b) making a full-sized puppet again with lights built in or added later or c) creating the entire creature in CG. Naturally the most financially conservative option is desired, but we are unsure as to how much time and money these various concepts would involve, and therefore any information, opinion or insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

Object tracking

Hi, I am just figuring out object tracking.. i would like to know how you would classify camera movement in object tracking. would it be as per the movement of the camera or the object? eg: if the camera is locked off but the object is moving, how would you set the camera movement? and also vice versa….
any tips on where i could find more about object tracking or tuts regarding the same would be nice…
thanks:D

importance of softwares

I hard that now a days nuke and fusion are used for composting but i learned after effects I am very much happy about it but companies asks fusion and nuke for freshers

which type of qualities require for good to get jobs in companies

Help with DCFFV book exercises

I am working through the exercises in the "Digital Compositing for Film and Video" book at the moment. Please could someone help me with exercise 2-2, which is about Chroma Keying. I have attached my script and the image. I get a really bad key on the jersey and blouse when I try it lol. I read that chroma keys mattes are usually not that high quality, but in this case, if you look at Steve Wright’s mattes, they are very different to what I am getting, so I must be doing something wrong. Thanks 🙂

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Mastering shaders in maya

Hi,

I am a very basic learner of maya.

I got a problem here.How to get photorealistic look for the designs that we modeled by using shaders in maya.

I would like to know all the optical properties that are required for the basic knowledge.

Properties like reflectivity,diffuse,scattering,specularity etc.

Is there any source for learning above properties of different kins of materials.

Thanks in Advance.

Water Fx and rendering particles

Hi all,

I have looked around everywhere, and cant seem to find any tutorials on water fx particle rendering.

There is plenty on water mesh rendering, smoke particle rendering plugins…but nothing really dedicated to water particles.

There’s realflow’s renderkit, but that doesn’t really look all that great (IMHO).

Anyone know of or can share more?

I’m working in Maya and or Softimage using Mental Ray.

There’s some volumetric shaders for particles and such in Mray…but I’m not sure how to use them to get the best results in the lowest render times.

that being said, If I were to say What should I use for smoke fx, you could say Fume FX and krakatoa…those are well known…and unfortunately only for 3dMax.

anyway any thoughts contributions welcome…

Thanks

Serious VFX questions…

Hi everyone, I am pretty knew to all of this and I would like to ask some questions. I really want to get into this and I have bags of passion, and I am very willing to put the hard work in.

First of all can someone helpo me define what it is I want to do? My interest lies in added visual effects to existing footage. For instance, I might go out and film a guy in a field, with a prop gun, then I want to added in gun fire muzzle flashes, an overhead jet speeding by, also firing a missile, adding an explosion as it hits the ground, etc. Basically I want to (ideally) add photo-realistic visual effects to actual footage. Is there a name for this? I am NOT really interested in making full-on stuff like what Pixar do.

So now knowing what I want do, what is the best software(s) for me? I see stuff on the internet that has usually been created by more than just one software package.

I recently purchased After Effects, but I have heard of many others. Maya, Shake, 3DS Max, Nuke, etc,etc. Can anyone tell which one of which ones I should invest in. Would you recommend starting with a particular one first before any other? Are they all similar to use or vastly different?

Also can anyone tell me if my laptop is good enough. The thing is computers ALWAYS seem to get better and better every day. I kinda think which ever knew one I buy will be the wrong one again 3 months down the line. My current laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A300 21H and I don’t really have the money to buy another. Please google it and tell me if it is adeqaute.

Thanks so much for any info people could give me, thanks.

SHOT for composition

Hi there. I’ve a question in matter of setting the camera. I want to do an effect of guy drinking his drink and after that he is dividing in half. How should I record this. I have only a cheap camera and later I want to composite it in Ae.

Can you give me a glimpse on how would you shoot it?
I thought about shooting twice from the same spot when he moves left and then right. There is an issue though because he probably will move in the second shot.

lightwrap

what is means lightwrap how we use it I know little bit means I made this lightwrap using the matte pass is their another ways for doing lightwrap for green/blue screen shots