Link to Arena Animation Academy, Sec 17, Chandigarh website
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Students checking out the State of the Art VFX Equiment
Arena Chandigarh Students check out State-of-the-Art VFX (Visual Effects) Equipment on their campus following “Learn The Secrets of becoming a VFX Pro!!” a Seminar by VFX Artist, and Specialist Aayush Chopra (Masters Degree in VFX from Bournemoth Universty, UK).
They were able to see and handle the high-end Video Stablizer one of it’s kind in North India (not even available with professional studios in North India). Only select studios across India have this equipment have this kind of equipment. Hence even most vfx professionals in India have not seen one!
The saw the imported Green Screen, Softbox lights with the highest possible illumination. They also saw the full body suits used in motion capture, follow focus, as well as the ubiquitious clap.
State-of-the-art VFX Equipment at VirtualSoft Studio
Learn the Secrets of becoming a VFX Pro!!
“Learn The Secrets of becoming a VFX Pro!!” A Seminar was held today at Arena Animation Academy, Sec 17, Chandigarh, by VFX Artist, and Specialist Aayush Chopra (Masters Degree in VFX from Bournemoth Universty, UK), on the path to becoming a VFX Professional and the learnings required to become one. Being privy to the latest happenings internationally, Aayush was in an excellent position to share the secrets of the professionals.
He demonstrated the entire VFX Pipeline to the hall chock-a-block eager students. Going through the pipeline step by step he uncovered each step and the various measures taken at each step to ensure that reality of the scene is not compromised. He also dwelled on the major savings in cost by the intelligent use of VFX quelling the myth that VFX is a costly option. In fact he showed why it is cheap to opt for VFX than go for a live constructed scene.
Trained in the Art of VFX by eminent VFX artists from the world over during his Masters at Bournemoth University, UK, Aayush shared various tips given by the experts to avoid costly equipment and the way simple utility items could achieve the same end result.
Arena Chandigarh also later demostrated state-of-the-art VFX Equipment directly imported from UK by their Studio VirtualSoft.
Learn The Secrets of becoming a VFX Pro!!!
various tips given by the experts to avoid costly equipment and the way simple utility items could achieve the same end result.
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- Best Performance Award
Bhanu Sharma, our Alumnus of Multimedia Program from 1997-1998 came visiting the campus to interact with the students and faculty on 28 Dec 2011. He spent some time interacting with the students sharing his experiences and answered their queries. He’s currently working in Ericcson as a Product Design Head and is located in the US. He recapped his long journey that started at Arena and through many different positions at Wanadu, Macromedia, Adobe and his own startups and upto the current position. He guided students on various aspects of tackling career issues and taking career decisions.
He gave away Awards to some Arena Toppers.
Best Performance Award
Avi Arora, Alumnus, Arena Chandigarh visits campus
Avi Arora, our Alumnus of BSc 2005-2008 came visiting the campus to interact with the students and faculty on 5 June 2012. She spent some time interacting with the students sharing her expertise and knowledge and answered their queries. She’s currently settled in Canada and has worked in the VFX on many leading hollywood films including the Harry Potter. She had completed her Masters in VFX from Seneca, Canada. Another Alumnus Anurag Bhateja from the same batch also visited the campus on the same day.
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- Avi Arora, Alumnus, Arena Chandigarh visits campus
The Alumnus of Arena Chandigarh met on 4 March 2012, to celebrate completion of 15 years of the First Batch.
The event was a Lunch at Hotel High Point at Sector 17, Chandigarh.
Alumnus enjoyed the sumptuous Lunch after discussions
30 Alumnus alongwith their wives/ husbands and kids came forth to celebrate the life they had at the centre. Anjali is a Lecturer at Govt. College of Fine Arts, Rajiv and Cheena run the leading IT company of the region Intelligaia.
Sandeep Dogra, Parminder are well established professionals, Chanderdeep Singh runs the famous Food Chain Froyo!! Ankit Saxena runs his own studio whereas Jasmeet Singh runs a leading Design House of the city.
The day started with a lot of surprises at the changes in the faces and reviving of old memories. Thereafter it was party time when Alumnus exchanged their lives and shared their progress with other. Thereafter, they all gathered to discuss the serious matters, like contributing to the growth of the design community of the city. They left with a promise to contribute their bit to the industry that gave them so much.
Match moving is primarily used to track the movements of a camera through a shot so that an identical virtual camera move can be produced in a 3D animation program. When new animated elements are composited back into the original live action shot they will appear in perfectly matched perspective and therefore appears seamless.
Match moving allows the insertion of computer graphics into live action footage with correct position, scale, orientation, and motion relative to photographed objects in the shot. The term is used loosely to refer to several ways of extracting motion information from a motion picture, particularly camera movement.
The process of tracking can be broken down into two steps.
1. The first step is identifying and tracking features. A feature is a specific point in an image that a tracking algorithm can lock onto and follow through multiple frames. Often features are selected because they are bright or dark spots, edges or corners, depending on the particular tracking algorithm. What is important is that each feature represents a specific point on a surface of a real object. As a feature is tracked it becomes a series of two dimensional co-ordinates that represent the position of the feature across a series of frames. This series is referred to as track. Once tracks have been created they can be used immediately for 2d motion tracking or then be used to calculate the 3D information.
2. The second step involves solving for 3D motion. The process attempts to drive the motion of the camera by solving the inverse projection of the 2D paths for the position of the camera. This process is referred to as a calibration. When a point on the surface of a three dimensional object is photographed its position in the 2D frame can be calculated by a 3D projection function. We can consider the camera to be an abstraction that holds all the parameters necessary to model a camera in a real or virtual word. Therefore a camera is a vector that includes as it elements the position of the camera its orientation, focal length and other possible parameters that defines how the camera focuses light onto the film plane. These parameters help in generating a huge bunch of points in a 3D environment, according to the position of the objects in the footage. These bunch of points are sometimes referred to as point clouds.
Example of Match Moving in PF Track
Example of 2D Tracking in After Effects
VFX Expert Aayush Chopra seting up the location for the Crane Shots
An 8 Day VFX Workshop was held by Aayush Chopra, VFX Artist, current visiting from Bournemoth, UK. During the Workshop students learnt various techniques and were demonstrated the application of various software like PF Track, Nuke, After Effects, Maya in the field of Visual Effects. They also learnt how to use professional cameras like Kiss4X, Canon 5D with professional lenses. They learnt cinematography techniques including taking Crane Shots and planning and editing the shots. They spent entire one day in Crane Shots and another day in Green Screen shots at the studio. Incidentally, Aayush Chopra is also an Alumnus of the Institute from BSc 2005-2008 Batch.
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- VFX Expert Aayush Chopra seting up the location for the Crane Shots
- Check if there is enough information in the footage for the tracking markers to hold on.
- If there is not much information for the tracking markers to stick onto the footage, start playing around with the footage manipulation settings, to bring out the information from the footage for the automatic trackers to hold onto the footage.
- Mask out the highly contrasted points on the edge of the footage, as they can produce many tracking points jumping on and off on the edge of the footage. These tracking points can stay stick over the edges looking for the contrast between white and black. So to fix that we need to stop the tracking points from going towards the edge of the frame by putting some dummy masks.
- Look for the objects in the scene that can help us for scene orientation. Pick an object with the horizontal line and draw an X axis line over that object, which will help our camera solution to automatically generate the ground plane orientation. Similarly drawing orientation lines over the objects with Y and Z information in the footage will further refine the camera solution.
- Set the tracking parameters according to the footage requirements.
- Start the automatic tracking and solving the camera together with track and solve.
- Right click on one of the tracking points on the ground plane and select set as origin, to define it as the origin point of the world.
Garbage Mask for the moving car object and Dummy Mask for the highly contrasted points of the Horizon.
X Y and Z axis line for scene orientation.
Studying the handling of professional SLR Camera
Aayush Chopra, our Alumnus of BSc 2005-2008 came visiting the campus to interact with the students and faculty during Dec 2011- Jan 2012. He spent some time interacting with the students sharing his VFX expertise and knowledge and answered their queries. He’s currently at UK doing advanced studies in the field of VFX at Bournemoth. He’s also finishing his Masters in VFX from Bournemoth University UK.
Students attending the VFX workshop went hunting for locations at various places. Here are some pics of that hunt as well as some learning moments where they understood the Camera Basics and operating SLR Cameras effectively.
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- Studying the handling of professional SLR Camera
The Alumnus of Arena Chandigarh met on 27 February 2011, to celebrate completion of 14 years of the First Batch.
The event was a Lunch at Hotel Shivalikview at Sector 17, Chandigarh.
30-40 Alumnus alongwith their wives/ husbands and kids came forth to celebrate the life they had at the centre. Anjali is a Lecturer at Govt. College of Fine Arts, Rajiv and Cheena run the leading IT company of the region Intelligaia,
Sunali (ex-Arena, ex-NID) is running her own company EastVillage, Anand is heading a large Design team at NetSolutions, Pooja (his wife) is also ex-NetSolutions, Ravi and Shashank are part of a 4 man tean which recently quit their jobs to startup a venture, Sanjeev Seth has started on his own after leaving his Senior position at SeBiz, Vipul, Sandeep Dogra, Viraaj, Puneet Sachdeva, Deepak, Mohit, Kulwinder, Bikramjit Singh, and Parminder are well established professionals, Gurwinder, Sarbjit and others are well on their way with nice jobs. Chanderdeep Singh runs the famous Food Chain Froyo!!
The day started with a lot of surprises at the changes in the faces and reviving of old memories. Thereafter it was party time when Alumnus exchanged their lives and shared their progress with other. Thereafter, they all gathered to discuss the serious matters, like contributing to the growth of the design community of the city. They left with a promise to contribute their bit to the industry that gave them so much.
