A few Questions on bluescreen\Rendering

[Sarcophagus]

Im mostly wondering the process how the animations made in maya are made into the actual film, like persay, the movie theatres still use the giant reels of film to show movies, at least most of them do, and most movies are 35mm movies, what is the process of actually getting your 3d images/movie, onto 35mm film, in super high quality of course , IM guessing its allot like a Negative burner for photoshop images, a scanner basically that takes the image from photoshop and burns it onto 35mm film you stick in the machine, had one at a school i was taking classes at, not bad actually, good quality..Im also interested in finding out an explained process of how to render out a film, and use the (after effects to make the final copy) any basic animation would do, mostly looking for the exact keys you choose to render out the hardware and other scene then batch render them together for a final avi.. Also the bluescreen, i saw commercial on that new all 3d movie, and all the actors are filmed on bluescreen, the rest of the movie is all 3d, looks amazing, havent seen it yet, bluescreen is an old way of getting layers into film, as i see it, but, how is this actually used, as in,,,, when ya film someone on a bluescreen, is there a certain blue you use?, how do you remove the bluescreen and get the person or what ever into a 3d sceen without the blue in the shot, like in photoshop youd simply select all the blue , remove it and make sure your picture is layerd and save as psd, so how do you do this bluesceen technique for the poor film maker.... i want to make a short movie, or a full one, what ever, and i wish to use some actors and such, my main goal in maya is for 3d modeling, but film making is also what i want to do, i know its prolly allot harder, being a pro photographer with amibitions to make a movie although my 3d and film making talents are low, i wish to get stronger in film making and animations that go into commercials or movies, if you have any information on some of these process's or just want to gab about stuff, post a reply, anything you wish, if ya need help in photography, ask away...
Sarc the newbie 3d person )

[happybob59]

there are a couple of good keying plugins for AE such as Primatte, and Ultimatte. Also try the demo of UltraKey at www.seriousmagic.com its a great program for doing bluescreen!
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I came i saw i got blown up

[JelloPhreak]

the blue that is used is known as Chroma Blue... but theres also Chroma Green, and Chroma Red... Red isn't used often since theres so much red in flesh tone. The color isn't so much important, as long as its consitantly lit, and has contrast to what needs to be keyed. The plug-ins HappyBob59 mentioned are great, but they're not free. if your scene is shot well, you can use standard After Effects plug-ins and get pretty good results. If your scene is not shot well, its hard to get a good result with standard plug-ins. The two plug-ins you can play around with are Color Key and Matte Choker. Check out this site... http://www.jushhome.com/AmMoviePort/ they have some bluescreening tutorials as well as a lot of cool links.

After Effects works much like photoshop in terms of layers. After you applyed your key(key is the term for removing the color) then have your other layers underneath it.

As for the Film question, I've never done it, but you are correct about how things are transfered. There are film transfer facilites that will take your digital files and "print" them to film.

Colin

[Sarcophagus]

thaks for all your help, lately i have a new problem and seems that when i render image sequences, the movie to tiff files, for some reason when i open the pictures in photoshop, the pictures are of my desktop or my screensaver or a piece of a webpage open on my pc, the rendered pictures are not of my scene at all =-(.. any idea why this is happennig, none of my renders are working and ive stopped working with maya for a few weeeks stummped on this issue....I want to get into bluescreen stuff when i can actually get an output to work properly, most of all i wanted to learn how to make some ships or stuffs,. animate them, lazerbeams shooting or something and render out to adobe after effects then make a finished piece and at the moment i cant seem to get the renders to work properly....
Once i can see or learn how to make the movie file i can move on..
Sarc the Super Newb
Jello if you seee this, I left a few questions on the other post we were talking in, maybee you turned it off? anyhow here is the link
http://www.learningmaya.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1524

[JelloPhreak]

Sorry... I didn't see that there were any new posts here...

I have no clue why you would be getting renders of your desktop/other applications. Which renderer are you using? Maya Software, MentalRay? Maybe if you were using the hardware renderer your graphics card could be messing up. Thats the only situation I can think of at the moment.

I'll go look at the other post now...

Colin

[JelloPhreak]

for some reason it wont let me post a reply in the other forum, so I'll answer your questions here...

Batch Render is under the Render menu in the rendering menu set(F5).
Before you start a batch render, make sure you have all your settings right in your Render Globals(Window->Rendering Editors->Render Globals). you can also change which renderer you are using. I'm thinking you might be using the hardware renderer because of the issues you're having with your screen showing up in the render. Your graphics card might not be qualified to run Maya. Change to the Maya Software renderer, or MentalRay if you have it.

Hope this helps

Colin

[Sarcophagus]

Kewl thanks, i been hoping youd find my post again hehehe, ill look into it , well this all started with the spaceship tutorial lol, at the end of one lesson he mentions how to make the final export (two) of them, it acts as if im doing the first one right, let me find the link, ill post what he says here to make it easier. i made my own ship, stuck a pic of mars in the view perspective thing and shot some photons that are functioning thanks to you ).. then i found this at the bottom of a lesson.......
Hide the path, locators and the lights.
Open the hardware render buffer, and select the new camera you have created for the one to render.(i used perspective) In the attributes section, turn on multipass rendering with 25 frames. Change the file format to tiff, the syntax to "name.0001.ext" and change the "end frame" to 150.(195 for me) Change the "Alpha Source" to "Hardware Alpha" and turn on geometry mask. Give the sequence a good name.
Render the sequence.
(this seems to work but the pictures are not of my model as explained. 195 frames in my sequence and i get 195 tiff files..)

Show the path, locators and the lights again.
Open the render globals, turn on animation, make it a production quality animation and make sure that you have chosen "tiff" as the file format as well as made your render camera the only renderable camera.
Batch render the sequence.

(never got to that part)
I see the mental ray you mentioned and other stuff, Im really such newbie i have no idea what they are for =).
thanks again, i havent been working on maya much this last few weeks.
Get'n cold in MIchigan, ill be stuck behind pc for a few months soon ).
Sarco Newbeh!

[JelloPhreak]