Perspective Matching

[Marcia]

A client of mine (awning mfgr) is entering into a partnership arrangement with an outdoor furniture mfgr to create total outdoor solutions for restaurants and etc. They want me to create custom models of the awnings and furniture and composite them into photos of the existing restaurants as a sales tool for their commercial sales departments. This could be a great ongoing opportunity, if I can find a way to match perspective/camera angles that doesn't take too much time, production-wise.

Does anyone have any tips or know of any tutorials or software that would help with this? I checked the Syntheyes (sp?) site, but can't determine if their product would be useful for stills or not. I can spend a little money (under $1k) if necessary, but obviously, the ideal would be not spending money upfront until I see if the project gets longterm commitment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I hear that the test site is a second-floor balcony set-up, so I'm already getting a little nervous. Thanks.

[nthused]

Worley has a camera match in one of their packages, taft perhaps. Looks good, have heard several people on the LW forum who like it. Have not used it myself.

[gaushell]

Imperfect Camera Match - properly named, works pretty well.

You need to create a simplified object or reference of something that exists in the background image and in relative scale and location to your new objects.

http://www2.ocn.ne.jp/~fis_junk/plug/win/FIsCMatch-i-0_2_4.zip

[Marcia]

Thanks to both of you. :)

[richdj]

Marcia, think this might be of interest http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/contentfull.aspx?content=pfhoe.htm It's got the 3DWorld review in pdf format to look at... and the tutorials for it are at http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/support/support.aspx?CID=4, theres also a demo version there...

Rich

[Nigel Baker]

Hello Marcia,

Have you been over to Worley.com
As far as memory serves me, they have a tool I think called Camera match, in either their Polk or Taft collections.
Its for this very job.

[Muad'dib]

For stills I use Taft Cam match it can produce excellent matches provided you give it enough / right info. All it takes is writing down 4-20 X/Y co-ordinates from your image that you want to match - and creating nulls / objects in your 3d space referencing those. Then you simply match one against the other in a table in the plug. Beauty is you can lock of any aspects of the camera and still get it to perform a match. Definitely woth the $ :) Once you get good at it you can do a match in no time - 5 mins. Not as interactive as the free one mentioned above but once you get into some complex stuff it really shines.

[Marcia]

Thanks, guys! You've given me just what I needed. I'm going to try the free plug-in for the test project, then buy the Taft package if we go forward from there. No idea you could accomplish the match so quickly... that sounds very promising!

PFHoe also looks like a great product, although it appears only to work with .avi and quicktime formats... I'll be sure to keep that in mind for walk-throughs, if we ever go that far.

Thanks again to everyone. :)

[Wade]

Just eyeball the thing - Not that hard if you know the the camera is at 5'8" off the ground and has a 35mm lens... If you have that to work with it's just move the camera around some to get the distance and angle right.

If you do not have that info it might take a little longer but is doable. ;)


this one is a little off, but not final but just eyeballed.