movie file as a front projection map?

[Lude]

Hi guy's is it possible to use a movie file as a front projection map from the camera.

I'm trying to make an animation in 2 passes:

Pass 1. Is a gray shaded animation (used for the GI lighting)
Pass 2. Is the same scene in colour using the first animation in the luminosity channel of the surfaces.

Lude.

[ingo]

Yes its possible. At the moment i'm rendering a walkthrough along a corridor into a room. Since the room has some tiny texturing details i rendered the frames from where the door to that room opens with the same walkthrough camera with higher aa; i use a mask to blend away the surrounding stuff. When doing the final animation i frontproject the prerendered animation onto a polygon which fills exactly the door.
But i haven't tried it the way you want to do it, maybe a short test will show you if it works.

[kopperdrake]

Ooh...nice idea Lude :) I guess you could also do it in post too?

Dunk

[Lude]

don't seem to be able to do it :(

[kopperdrake]

Hmm...do you mean you can't do it in post or in LW?

[Lude]

In Lightwave - not sure how to do it - I can put the movie file into the front projection but don’t know how to get it to go past frame 1 so it matches up with the current frame.

If I was going to do it in post what would be the best software – After-effects?

[trick]

don't seem to be able to do it :(

Always use image sequences, then there should be no problem...
And be sure in the image editor to set the sequence to "sequence", NOT to "still" ;)

[kopperdrake]

Yep - I'd try After Effects personally, you get all the control of Photoshop but in motion. Saying that, I wonder if it's possible to batch the job in Photoshop?!

As trick suggests though - still images is the way to go :)

[ingo]

As suggested take a close look at the image editor, first time i had done it i used a wrong startframe a a duration that is to short. Maybe i'll do a test later today to project my animation onto a surface to see if it works. It just has to render a few hours to be finished first. BUT, isn't it easier to bake the few main elements ???

[Lude]

It might be but I haven't tried baking since version 6 because it was so crap at the time.

[ingo]

Baking is still crap, but Microwave is a nice Plugin if you want to do it more often. Otherwise i tested your idea, works fine here. I just loaded my Quicktime animation into the image editor, switched the alpha channel off, and put it into the color channel of several objects. Voila, thats it. Now i try to render a Fprime MC pass with only default material to see if its possible to comp it (should be interesting to do this in FCPro though, but thats for the next spare time).