When placing tracking markers on your greenscreen, do the markers have to be uniform (placed at precise incriments), or can they be scattered and staggered? Also, is there a particular individual shape they have to be for MAYA's software to recognise as markers (plusses, squares, circular dots)? We were planning on just using a lighter hue of masking tape.
The markers do not have to be precise, just placed in positions that are visible for the majority of the shot. Also, the shape of the markers does not have to be particular either. Sometimes various shapes are used to aid in lining up set geometry (set reconstruction) once you've got both the set geo. and the footage on the computer.
Hi
Sorry new to this... what are tracking markers on green screen?
jx
They're markers you put on the background so that your compositing software can figure out how the camera moved and ensure that any effects you add afterwards will look realistic.
For example, I was watching a documentary about the making of that BBC dinosaur show some time back, and when they did a wobbly hand-held shot in a forest where they wanted to stick a CG dinosaur in the background they stuck ping-pong balls on the trees as markers. The software looks at how the markers move from frame to frame and can calculate the camera movement from that, and the 3D rendering software can then figure out how to move the 'camera' while rendering so that the dinosaur appears to stay in the same place as the camera moves around.
