thanks for the nice words.
QUOTE
I was really wondering if you could share how you use camera projections within Nuke, specifically something like the jungle shot that you did in King Kong. For instance what were you projecting and on to what and what were cards? I can't quite visualize the set up.
In the bronto grazing shots I mainly used camera projections for the temples and a little pool of water and the ground plane in the fg to tie it in with the life action and make it pick up the same parallax.
For the temples I pulled in the rough survey terrain which gave me the correct positions in space, then I used boxes and bicubics that were lined up with that geo to project the plates onto. This would give me a bit of depth/parallax when the camera was moving.
the far bg was projected onto a sphere, not to get parallax but because with projections it's easier to line up matte paintings that were created based on one of the shots frames.
Once I had the temples and far bg in place I started populating the whole thing with cards for all the foliage. For nodal camera moves I had my TD render the brontos through a static camera so I could place them on cards as well which made it easier to interlace them with the environment as I didn't have to create hold out mattes from my environment to cut out the moving cg.
Generally when you wanna learn about camera projections just visualize what happens in the cinema. The projector is your projection camera and the audience is the render camera. the closer you sit to the projector in the last row the smaller the distortion will be whereas when you sit in the front row the entire screen is 'corner pinned'. So if you have a moving camera and need to line up something on a specific frame and make sure it's undistorted you need to make sure the projection camera at that frame is in the same position and has the same rotational values as your render camera. The further the camera moves aways from the projector the more distortion you will get.
cheers,
frank