putting a sign on the side of a vehicle
 

Hi, I want to put a sign on the side of a vehicle which will be driving around. Having it signwritten will cost a lot so i was wondering if this can be done in post?

Does anyone know what sofware would be used for this and what i would have to watch out for when I shot the sequence?

many thanks

It can be done in post, but it isn't easy, and could get very hard if you were to have complex shots.

Keep the camera stationary, and keep the vehicle stationary. Except... you probably can't do either of those things.
Mostly, then, try to make the side of the truck move slowly, with minimal 3D movement (panning, driving straight, etc., are fine; turning around a corner with the camera watching, the camera moving around the car, etc. would be tough.)

For actually doing it:
1. Track the motion of the truck. I'd suggest having something there in the first place to track. Put, at least, 4 points on each of the corners of the 'sign'.
Since it IS a 2D surface, you might be able to get away with 2D tracking with a corner pinning technique. But you might also need to use 3D tracking if the motion got very complex. That's why I suggested basic motion above.
2. Place your graphic based on the track.
3. Rotoscope anyone/anything in front of the sign out of the way. (Duplicate the original layer, place the sign between, the add parts of anyone/anything back in on top if they cross the sign.)
4. Integrate with the video-- reflections, noise, colors, blur, etc. This can be tough. Especially for reflections, you'll need to figure out some creative solutions. A matte (dull) sign would be a big help with that.

The fewer shots the better, and the less motion the better. It's possible to put it in there with any amount of motion/shots, but it will become increasingly more difficult, and quickly.

A shakey camera is a really bad idea, unless you know someone who is good with 3D tracking.


As for software, you'll need some sort of compositing app. After Effects, Shake, Fusion, Combustion, etc. All of them can do this.
If you do get into complex 3D motion, a 3D app (maya, max, etc.) might help, though may not be needed, and boujou, icarus, syntheyes or other 3D motion tracker would be a big help.


Take a look at this reel for some idea of how it's done:
http://www.urbanviz.com/

You could regret trying to do this in post. Find a creative solution to make a real sign. This is no time to learn compositing. Tracking the vehicle is the easy part. The hard part is matching the existing footage. I suppose it depends on what your expectations are, but if you want seamless CGI you might find it to be a challenging tasks. Assuming you are not going to do it yourself, I recommend you consult your compositor while drawing your storyboards.

Good point. I meant to mention that.
Tracking is not necessarily the easiest part, and certainly not easy. But, yes, matching is very tough. (But depends on the shots.)

I'd suggest learning construction before learning VFX in this case.

You'd be paying a VFX artist a lot more than that to do the work, if you can't/don't figure it out yourself.

Sometimes the easiest solution to what may be become a problematic and difficult VFX shot is not to do a VFX shot and shoot it practically. This is one of those times. Good Luck.

Oh, sorry for misleading you. That isn't my reel. I found that browsing some posts at vfxtalk.com, and it applies to the question, so I thought a visual would be a helpful example.
The original thread is here:
http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/composi...el-t11372.html

(Though you were right about fxphd, it seems.)

Hmm my mistake. I didn't read carefully. A nice reel nonetheless.

If the vehicle is turning and moving so it's oblique to the camera you'll open up a whole 'nuther can of worms because, uness the sign is painted on the flat side of a truck body, as the truck or car (worse) becomes oblique the curved shape of the vehicle becomes more apparent and the sign would have to deform appropriately to look like it was painted on the (curved) surface.

If the vehicle is passing straight across the field of view of the camera you have some odds of success, but if not - it won't be easy!

All in all it's not impossible, but not easy unless it's a really simple pass in front of the camera. I noticed in the referenced show reel that the graffiti etc was layed onto planar surfaces.

By the way, if you want to try the motion tracking route, Syntheyes is quite good and very reasonably priced. Learning curve is non-trivial.

Any chance you could get one of those flexible magnetic sheets and make a sign out of it with paint, or letter templates, or even with letters or a whole sign printed with an inkjet? And then just slap it on the vehicle?

Figure out some way to physically place the sign, if you can, unless it's a relatively simple type of shot. With changes in angle, perspective, lighting, and things moving between the camera and the vehicle, that's potentially a lot of match-moving (probably using a specialized tool like Boujou/Monet/PFTrack), 3D compositing, and rotoscoping, in no particular order of hair-pullingness.

Consider that if the reason for not doing a real sign is that you don't think it would look real enough, it will look much worse with VFX for the same amount of effort.

I've been thinking about it some more and I think that if (IF!!!) I were to attempt something like this in Cinema 4D with Body Paint or Lightwave or Maya etc I wouldn't really have to model the whole car, just the panel where the sign would go, and maybe, just maybe, I could get away with a rough approximation of the curvature of the door panel on which I wanted to put the signage.

So maybe not quite as hard as I was thinking - but still damned hard. If I were a Hollywood producer with millions to spend, I know there are people who could do it and do it well.

So I'm convinced it's possible, but I wouldn't attempt it personally and I wouldn't advise anyone who isn't 100% fluent in CGI and compositing and match moving to even think about it.

Find a way to stick a sign on the vehicle if at all possible.

It's absolutely possible. Just VERY hard. Much harder than making it in real life.

As for the modelling, that's the least of your concerns. A rough approximation will be fine and go unnoticed. Even a flat image might do depending on the vehicle.

Problems will come from tracking then matching.

What about having a cheap version of the sign printed at Kinko's (for example) and then magnet it to the vehicle (you can use those business card magnets or 8x10 magnet sheets from the office store), that will give you something to use in post - you can clean it up, clean the edgest/brighten/etc -- but all the basic physicals of it will be there in the shot for you to use. I think that would take a lot of the post time and issues out.

Just an idea.

of course a lot of this depends on the shot itself but -corner pinch- comes to mind.

thank you for all your replies. i ddnt realise there would be so much to doing it in post. i think the magnetic option sounds the easiest as it wouldnt danage the van.

As a professional matchmove artist who works on everything from indie films to TV commercials to feature films .... I just want to chime in to back up what's been said so far. .... printing a sign or banner or something at Kinkos or Staples or anything like that and using magnets to apply the sign to the van will be FAR more effective and less costly than learning tracking as you go.

Imagineer Monet is an application that is dedicated to this type of work, but go check the price of that and you'll find the printing costs are far less ;) (plus you don't have to learn tracking.)

There are several matchmove applications that will happily track your car in 3D (SynthEyes, Boujou, MatchmoverPro, PFTrack) ... but prices generally start at several hundred dollars and range up into the thousands depending on which app and feature set you choose. ... and that doesn't include that you would still need to export the results into a 3D app to render the sign for compositing (though I guess 3D for a flat sign can be done in most compositing tools these days).

Anyway ... looks like you're all set to go with a magnetic sign.
(Might want to check with local sign printers. They can often print large format magnetic sheets that will look a lot better than a paper sign stuck on with little magnets.)

Good luck.
Have fun.

I second the vote for a sign shop making a magnetic sign. Little magnets will probably fall off if air gets between the vehicle and the sign itself. At the least the paper or whatever would flutter and the magnets would be visible in the picture.

There might also be some films that are printable and can then be adhered to the vehicle - just guessing.

Real Estate agents etc often have these magnetic signs because they can put them on the car during the day and take them off when using the car for personal use.

By the way, unless it's a big boxy truck, the sign will likely not be a plane when it's on the vehicle as side panels etc are usually curved. Getting a curved 3D surface of the same shape as the car door or whatever isn't so terribly difficult, (drill holes in a grid on a piece of plywood and stand it up close to the surface and poke dowels through until they hit the door, then measure them and loft the surface in something like Rhino and export to your package of choice and project a sign on it as a texture).

But if the surface isn't a plane, I'm not sure AE etc can do much with it so you'd be into a really interesting exercise in tracking the vehicle motion and exporting the motion path and having your 3D package fly the panel around, light it properly in the 3D package, make sure it's believably textured with some dirt etc etc etc. and render out a video and then try to match it up with the real video --- aaaaaghhhh! To say nothing of having to have proxy geometry as texture catchers for anything between the camera and the truck so the sign would get occluded at the right spots.

Actually, sounds like kind of fun to try and make it all work

By the way, I did check the price of Monet - seems pretty reasonable for something like this. (around $4000) Pretty comparable to a full blown copy of Cinema 4D with all the modules and a few plug-ins, maybe a bit cheaper than a full Maya license.

Monet is a specialist tool for object placement. It is not a 3D renderer like C4D or Maya.

Hi Emre!

I know - I watched all the demos on the Monet site. I was just trying to comment that pricewise it isn't out of line with the kind of $$$ one has to pay for higher end 3D CG packages, and to do what the original post asked you would probably need a suite of tools each one of which was in this price range. Makes the Adobe CS3 Production suite look like an absolute steal!

By the way, the demos seemed to have been shot so this kind of replacement would work well - I noticed that in the demo with the bottle the motion was such that all the motion was pretty much in a plane and around the axis of the camera lens, so curvature of the bottle wouldn't be a problem. If you were taking a shot of a minivan driving past the camera, as it got off to one side of the camera position or turned a corner, the curvature of the side would become obvious so a planar sign might look like it was tearing away from the vehicle. Might be able to make it work in 2D by "morphing" the sign though.

Magnetic vehicle signs
 

I agree 100% with the advice to use a custom made magnetic sign (two actually, one for each side of the vehicle). I just did a 2 day B-roll shoot for a low-budget feature using these on the side of a van . They were absolutely worth the up-front cost. Much cheaper than post production fx work.

Best,
Simon.

OK, now that I've convinced myself that this is impractical to pull off in post, I may be talking myself into thinking that it could be done a lot more simply than I was thinking.

I still am of the "use a magnetic sign" opinion, BUT, in fairness to the spirit of the original post, I'd like to think up a practical way to pull it off.

What I'm thinking is that if you take a bunch of sticky dots that are big enough to see clearly in the video, and stick them to the vehicle in a regular grid covering the area where the sign should go, as the vehicle moves and turns, the grid will deform accordingly.

If you could use the grid points as control points for a 2D morph, and warp the image of sign under the control of these points, then the deformation of the sign should match pretty closely with what would happen to a real sign.

I know that programs like Morpheus Animation Studio let you use a collection of points to control the warping of an image. They say that the morph can be driven by such points and by a series of key frames, and output as an AVI.

Whether programs like After Effects have any such capability or not, I don't know, but I think there are some 2D animation packages that might have similar capabilities.

You'd have to be really careful to not let anything get between the camera and the vehicle while taping, but if you could control the environment of the shot carefully enough (or mask out offending objects) this might all be do-able.

The devil is always in the details, and since this isn't the kind of thing I do myself I don't know enough of the details to be useful, but conceptually it seems like it should be possible.

Comments?

Yup.
Most compositing apps these days, including AE & Shake (even Motion now), have built in tracking and corner pinning tools that could pull something like this off, especially if you feel like investing in extra frame-by-frame pixel pushing time to really eek out more realism. There's also Monet and the list of several 3D tracking options from my earlier post.

Really, if you already have the tools AND experience to work them, this is truly a routine post-production task that's employed in MOST national level TV ads, network shows and movies (even most high-end corporate video too).

It's just not the kind of thing you want to be learning and experimenting with when you've got a low budget and a deadline looming. Under those conditions, it's exactly the kind of thing that can completely wreck a production.

I couldn't agree more - don't try this kind of stuff when you're on a schedule and you haven't done it before.

I was aware of the tracking and corner pinning tools (although not experienced in their use) but I never thought they could handle the non-linear deformations that you'd see in a regular grid on a curved surface as it moves and rotates freely in space and apply those deformations to an image.

Good points so far. However, what resolution are you going to shoot this in? Any noise, shift in pixels, and glare is going to require rekeying. You'll litterly track this on a per frame basis. You would have to shoot in manner convenient for the track.

I have lightwave plugins that can do this, and almost carpel tunnel using digital fusion.

The magnetic approach is good, even painting the thing for the shot, and repainting after is cheaper. You should only get these kinds of jobs as an after-thought, when the production has wrapped and producer is in fits in doing whatever it takes to correct his or her oversight. When the real answer should have been to reshoot!