Matt Merkovich on 3D tracking Minority Report
Aug 31, 2015 by CGP Staff
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VFX Supervisor and Syntheyes specialist Matt Merkovich relates the camera tracking work he did for Spielberg’s Minority Report almost 15 years ago, using Autonomous Effects’ Scene Genie plugin for 3DS Max. Watch the video on Vimeo.
Ahh, SceneGenie… Now that was a brilliant collection of tools I would love to see resurrected somehow! There was just so much cool things you could do with it – and all inside 3ds Max.
@superrune
Would you please tell us a bit more about it, haven’t seen SceneGenie in action…
SceneGenie was a collection of controllers and utilities, that enabled you to have captured data affect different parts of the scene. You could do everything from capturing shadows and use them to calculate object position, you could capture camera positions into your scene, and even analyze face expressions from video to control morph targets. It would even let you do circular transform influences that would ordinarily create dependency loops.
It was very impressive and not too hard to use, and there hasn’t really been any tools like it since. If MCG ever gets something like image analysis (both from renders and outside data), then you could start doing some of the things SceneGenie could do.
I still have the installer and manual on some CD. I remember the license kept falling out for the smallest change on your system, so I doubt I get to use it today though 🙁