Poser is great for photorealism and all.  What I am trying to accomplish might not be possible, but I wanted to tap the minds of the folks who are a lot better at using it than I.

You know what consumer camcorder footage looks like.  And this is VHS, not even Hi-8 that I am referring  to.  Well several years ago for a college project  we made a movie using consumer camcorders.  Part of the movie included a knock-down drag-out cat-fight between the 2 lead role gals.  Try to contain yourself guys!  Sorry but the girls are not willing to release the footage to everyone.  :tongue1:

Well anyhow the fight scene was really, really lame.  But a few of us are still in contact and we had an idea of substituting the 2 lead gals by making Poser models of them, and re-doing the fight scene with a lot more action.

I'm not even getting into the whole animation thing yet.  All I want to first accomplish is to:

1)  Simulate the room lighting, and possibly the room itself.  It might be easier to simply render over a background picture of the original footage.

2)  Build models of the gals.

First I just want to work with the room itself and the lighting.  I really need help with the lighting.  Every attempt I have made to simulate the lighting of the footage looks horrible.  The shadows are too hard, the colors don't match, etc.

Here is a picture of the two girls getting ready to rumble.  Their faces are conveniently not shown to protect the innocent.  LOL.  Well, they insisted. 

Now here is the room with the gals off to the side.  This picture might be a tad bit more useful.

It is all natural room lighting (light from the windows and probably a few lamps turned on...nothing more).  Every model I try to place in the scene looks horribly out of place.  How would I even begin to try to make a photo-realistic model fit into low-res camcorder footage? 

I would love tips on setting up the lighting to try to make the room look right.  Then I'll get to work on the actual models.  Thanks to anyone who is willing to lend a hand to a simpleton like yours truly.

Terri

If you get the lighting right and position the objects properly in the room then it should look more like the scene, I don`t know the size in width and height of your animation but try rendering to that size to help to make it work.

It looks like there is one lightbulb with light and some windows, a distant light could be used for the lightbulb and spotlights for the windows lights.

Umm...

Er...

The only thing I can think of is - ask Peter Jackson or George Lucas to help you out. This kind of photorealistic animation is an enormous project.

The room area looks like a fairly simple shape. Can you still get access to it? Does it look the same? You could maybe take some photos and put them onto a UV-mapped model, built e.g. in Wings3D.

As for the girls, you might find clothing and hair to match, and morph some faces, but they definitely will look CGI.

Poser works for Final-Fantasy style animation, where everything has a superclean CGI look.  As for making things look down and dirty, that's something the major studios are still trying to perfect. It might well be possible, with a lot of work, to get some kind of interesting fight animation. But it's unlikely to match your camcorder footage.

Maxfield -

The old room is gone.  That was a house we rented in college, and it has been sold since.  I doubt they have the same decorations.  :)

Would you agree that in order to get models to better fit in to the old camcorder footage, I should knock down the reflective qualities of the clothing/figures as much as possible?  I'm just brainstorming here so I have a game plan... 

I agree everybody will look CGI'ish, but whatever I can do to minimize the effect I would like to at least try.

I agree with Maxfield....    I was going to suggest to try on getting that look with some work in Poser and lots of post work.....   You might get a combination of effects to give you that VHS look...   but then you have one frame and possibly a few hundreds to go.....   

Your really talking highend equiptment ----OR---- you can give up your VHS look and give up on having your CGI models look exatly like your real friends and then you can do it...  With a lot of patience...  and many visits to this forum...

welcome......

Thank you Tom.  I appreciate you and Max at least reigning me in and not letting me expect the impossible.  But then again, that is why I asked. 

I know I cannot make things look exact, but I just want to move away from the all-too-obvious CGI model look.

Besides toning down the reflections and trying to take out a lot of the "shiny look" that  the models tend to have, I was considering modeling the characters in Poser over a green screen.  Then I could apply them over a background image of the room in Premiere.  The upside of doing things this way is I could use some of the Premiere filters directly on the Poser animations.  By taking down the contrast, or doing something else to create a "fuzzy look" I think I can move another baby step away from the obvious CGI and toward blending with camcorder footage.

I appreciate all the help everyone has provided...hey it's only 5 am where I am!    Anyone with ideas please add them to the thread, or IM them to me. 

Thanks again
Terri

Turning off specularity on most surfaces will help.

Do I simply disconnect the Specular node to turn it off?

I would disconnect any textures attached to the specular color and change the specular value to zero.

Attached Link: Help: Are there ANY textures for Poser 4 Lores Woman or Man, ANYWHERE?

If you're determined to try - and Poser got where it is today by people trying impossible things - here's a couple of tips.

You don't need a greenscreen in Poser. If you render out your animation as a series of still images in .PNG or .TIFF format, they'll automatically have a transparent background. Premiere should be able to import these without a problem.

Poser renders tend to be quite low-contrast anyway, so you've got a head-start.

Experiment with higher-than-normal motion blur settings. Camcorder footage tends to blur movement quite a lot.

Instead of trying to hide the CGI/video difference, could you emphasise it? Think about Matrix Revolutions, where the two guys are rolling round fighting in the mud, and suddenly there's this long, slo-mo CGI shot of a fist hitting a face.

Do you have Poser 6? If so, you can experiment with IBL lighting. It shines a diffuse, multi-tinted light onto your models, making them look more realistic.

Thanks again Maxfield. 

I do have Poser 6.  I did try out IBL long before I considered this wacky project.  What I remember was that the Time to Render in Firefly went through the roof compared to the Poser 4 renderer.

But I will give it a shot.  I also like your idea of increasing the blur in Premiere.

Yes, if you try for total photorealism you will probably be dissapointed, I would aim for getting the people looking as close to the real ones as possible, using the face room or by making your own textures and trying to get things like the lighting right and the clothes etc, it can still turn out quite good without being photorealistic.

As I recall, VHS has a lower resolution than DVD, partly interlacing and partly lower horizontal resolution. That can make it even harder to fake. Have you seen Kill Bill? Tarentino uses an anime-style section to tell part of the story. So, do you need to do a convincing fake, or can you tell the story differently? For instance, a character sees them after the fight, and what we see is the CGI of what he imagines happened.

VHS has approximately a third of the resolution of DVD, a camcorder is even lower resolution than VHS.

Antonia -

Yes I have seen Kill Bill.  I'd rather go for the convincing fake...even if it isn't going to be too convincing, lol.

Things are coming along rather well.  The poses I have tried with the figures are matching the old footage pretty well, thanks to the advice you all have lended!  Post processing in Premiere has helped with the blend.

Now I am on to designing the hair for the figures...

If you have a cd writer, a dvd player that can play vcd's, and a video recorder, you could put a low res copy of the 3d clip in mpeg format on cd (PAL is usually 640 by 480 pixels but I would do less). Hook up a scart cable from the back of the dvd player to the video recorder. Record from cd to vhs (the older the tape the better, if you want lots of "noise"). Then just capture the footage back to the computer the way you did with the original footage. It's a long way round but maybe the best way of doing it without using video editing software. Black and white is alot easier to age and match in, colour is surprisingly hard.

good luck with the venture. however, I don't think it's realistic for one person using one computer (and any version of poser prior to 7) to expect to render a photorealistic movie of more than a few seconds length in any reasonable amount of time. it might be easier to render a typical poser movie (bad lighting, bad shadows, bad joints, bad hair, bad movement, bad clothes- fitting, no background, et al.), then apply various filters in one's video editor to simulate an old videotape.

Hi, Terri -

Just to throw in my 2 cents here...

You are facing a long road here, and I can say why in just 1 word: HAIR. Even if you were able to get the set, the lighting, the textures and the models just right (a BIG IF - and tons of work besides) duplicating your friends' frizzy hair as she moves around in a fight scene is just never going to work in Poser.

I'm wondering if you aren't looking at this as a "nail" problem just because you have a Poser "hammer." In clearer words, is CG really your best option here? Have you considered doing it with conventional video? Buy a long roll of bright green fabric, grab your friends (or some drama students from the local community college - they work for pizza!) and set up some work lights in a garage, with the green fabric as a backdrop. Position the camera on a tripod as close as possible to the original angle, approximate the original costumes as best you can, and re-shoot the fight sequence (with better choreography this time! ;-)

Then you can take your home-made green screen footage into a video application and match the original. You can spend hundreds on a project like this (and if that's OK, check out Ultra green screen software from Serious Magic. Their cheaper Visual Communicator might fit the bill as well.) You can also spend much less - check out Zwei-Stein from Thugs@Bay which is FREE and can handle the software end of such a shot all by itself.

Finally, if you're dead set on using Poser, I'd say don't even attempt to re-create the VHS look within Poser. That's a post-processing type of effect that would be better done in your video editor/compositor.  Depending on what app you use for this, you might even be able to find a plugin that will handle much of the grunt work for you.

Wow, great advice from everyone!  Thank you so much.

Jimdoria-

I'm not dead set on using Poser.  As you rightly said, I've been looking at it as a "nail problem" with Poser as the "hammer," since I own it and somewhat know how to use it.

I've considered a lot of different options.  Even some type of rotoscoping or matching software (like Syntheyes?) to redo the fight scene with others while still making it appear the original "stars" are involved.  Again, I know this is getting into Peter Jackson type stuff.  But then again we're just having fun here and it does not have to be perfect.

Terri