This is a very general step by step process on how to use Boujou 4.

First things first. Have some kind of footage preferably something that goes around an object of some sort. The more corners the easier it will be. Also shaky camera movements, motion blur, and zooms aren't going to be easy they can be done but for the sake of this tutorial lets just avoid them. Next we need this footage in a workable format. Since we are also going to be using Maya to rebuild the scene Tiff Sequences or Avi Uncompressed work best with this. The video to your right is the video I will be using and i even thru in some fun stuff for the sake of it.

Now that you have your sequence you need to import it into Boujou. So goto Setup/Import Sequence, Ctrl+I, the button Import Sequence on the left tool bar, or just drag it into the stage.

You now should see the begining and end frame in the Import Sequence window. Name it. Then choose your move type. Free Move is the kind that i have done because the camera has moved around. Nodal Pan is for when the camera is stationary but possibly turning... aka paning. For this one use Free Move. Then say interlaced or not and hit OK.

Boujou will have your sequence in there. The bottom is your Time Line feel free to click and drag inside the time line to watch your video.

Lets go thru the buttons now. This is my typical shelf. I rarely use all of them. I think they might explain themselves though.

Focal Length will let you input the numbers for the focal length of your camera. If your working with a Professional Company they should have the information you need to get the camera perfect.

The next thing we will be doing is getting ride of that lame toy car i thru in there to try to mess up the track. Hit the Add Poly Masks button. Now find the frame with the car in it to block it out and i'm just making a square cuz it is very small. If you need room to have it go off frame right click the stage and zoom out. Otherwise to make the mask just click and make your points and reclick the last one to close it. The mask will animate with the time line and you can see each key frame if you click on the plus sign next to Masks on the Time Line. This is handy if you need to delete the keyframe just right click and hit delete. Then just keep blocking it off untill your satisfied. If you want to move the whole mask click on the middle box inside the mask. To rotate the box grab the arrow and move it around. To just scale the mask grab the other sideof the arrow and pull. You can move it point by point or grab the line by clicking on it. If you need to reverse the mask, to stick to an object or whatever, right click your mask and invert. This is handy because I think movies and videos are much more entertaining with actors and what not.

Now that your mask is done and out of the way it gets easy. Hit the Track Features button. This will bring up a little box. Hit Advanced to see some options. Usually the default is good enough for me but sometimes the track can get tricky. Since my video has this nice magazine to help track off of I'm putting mine to low sensitivity it will also help get rid of that nasty reflection off the table. Keep your min search distance to 1 so that way if it tracks something it won't need it will be thrown out. The max distance to 20 because its only so many frames anyway. The Feature Scale I left at normal because the smaller points help this scene (go ahead and click on it to see it anyway). I put mine also on just the red channel since my video is warm and grainy, this will minimize bad tracks. I left off the fast track because this is a short sequence anyway so it won't make any difference anyway.

Once your done or just felt like leaving it at the default hit Start. This usually only takes a minute or two but can be a hefty time depending on the situation.

You should now have something that looks like my thumbnail to the right. You can now go ahead and scrub thru it. You can select the tracks that look wrong and delete them if you want. If you think some of them are perfect right click the track and make it gold. You usually don't have to do this but if the track is tricky you might have to.

Now for the best part! Camera Solve!

To the left are the options that pop up for Camera Solve. Deleting the exsisting solves if for if you messed up your previous attempt to do a camera solve. So I'm leaving that as is. I want to do the whole sequence so I'm keeping that dotted. But if I wasn't you can choose your range in the Solve Range area by frame. Optimizing the radial distortion parameters and Optimize camera path smoothness is supposed to help with smooth camera movement but as you can tell mine is a little shakey because I shot it by hand with a crappy camera. If you feel that it will help by all means go for it but I haven't noticed any difference from checking them or not.

Now it's time to hit Start. This could take a little while but usually not too long.

Now your camera should be solved and scrub thru to see if there is any jitters because if there is you have 2 choices. One redo the entire process and play around untill it locks or when you export it into maya fix it in the graph editor and make sure the points lock.

If your going to export it to maya continue on with me. Name it and choose your export type to be Maya 4+ or compatable with whatever type of maya you are using. I'm using Maya 2008 so 4+ works for me.

Now your scene should look something like this when you open Maya. So to lock that ground plane select all - group - Rotate and Move, till the Magazine is on the grid. You can tell what is the magazine because it has the most points in the field of points. So I level that out and throw a plane down to receive shadows and be a fake magazine. This is part of the recreating the scene. You can go as far as you feel on making the scene. and use the video and points as the reference for whats in the scene. These points are very helpful so pay attention to what they look like they lock on to.

I plan on rendering this out in maya so if your curious on how to make that scene you made invisible make a lambert. Set the color to the material Use Background. To avoid it making shadows goto your atribute editor Ctrl+A goto render stats and uncheck Casts Shadows. I'll cover more of helping rendering later. For now we need to fix the track and camera movements via graph editor.

Now from what i've experienced in this the tracks aren't to bad. So if anything you might need to delete a few points to the camera's movement. To do this select your camera and select all the locked camera movements (Translates & Rotates) right click and unlock them. Open your Graph Editor and it should look something like the picture to the right.

Do you see the Spikes in the animation. I noticed one on frame 73 so I'm going to select all the points on frame 73 and delete them to help with the camera move. You then do this for everytime you notice a bump in the video that makes it seemed unlocked. It might take some time but scrub thru your time line and have a window looking thru your camera (Panel/Perspective/Camera_1_1) and if you see any bumps fix them out thru graph editor.

After all is said and done, you should be able to have a video like this one to the left. Assuming you compiled it the way I did.
I hope this was helpful to all you new be's out there.  


The work of Mark Matta
e-mail: freepupet@yahoo.com phone: 586-219-2368