I’m trying to do a simple nested projection with 2 checkerboards. I can set it up in Nuke simple enough but i want to do the same inside flame. For some reason i cant get t to work.
Do you guys use nested setups?
1 Like
I’ve never used nested projections. Sounds interesting. I’d bet that @andy_dill would know how it works in Flame.
1 Like
I’m not familiar with the term.
Would this be a situation like:
Shot A is of a wall with an animated video of shot B, and Shot B needs some logo removal via projections?
1 Like
Same not familiar with that term either.
Are we talking stacked projected frames on a single obj?
2 Likes
Hi @andy_dill and @joelosis . I basically want to create 2 projections on the same geo, one on top of the other. Its a projection inside a projection along the camera path.
Basically i have a camera projection bootcamp, its for Nuke but i want to try and apply these principles in Flame.
1 Like
Ok , so it would just be a regular projection. Then duplicated with your new source applied while making sure zbuffer is off.
Make sense?
1 Like
Thanks Joel,
The example used is of a shot in a field moving out until you can see the whole city, so using multiple projections that way all on top of each other.
1 Like
So essentially creating a completely projected plate of the entire camera move?
2 Likes
I guess so yeah. In Nuke its all projected onto the same card/geo.
1 Like
Hey @Char87, In Nuke, you can’t feed more than one geo and one texture into a Project2D node. In Flame speak, that means you can only project one texture onto a geo. You can merge multiple projections that use the same geo and that is basically what Joel is suggesting. If you’re projecting 2 textures that use the same camera (and same hold frame) then you would probably have more luck comping the textures on top of each other in 2D and then doing a single projection in Action.
2 Likes
In practice, Nuke’s scanline render is terrible at combining premultiplied projections. I almost always have to use multiple Scanlines and using Merges to combine projections. On paper, Nuke looks smarter but in practice, Flame is at least as good at this task.
2 Likes
There are two types of projections in flame:
Diffuse map projections, which are a 1-per-object texture map that project from an existing in-scene-camera (usually a copy of the tracked camera with all keyframes deleted—park on the ‘project from’ frame and press ‘keep’ in the animation window)
And the other form of projection is
Projectors. Or “old projectors” as I refer to them for clarity. You can hit the same geo with many projectors using all kinds of blend modes. But they are more finicky overall. Priority order and transfer modes are keyframeable and governed by the projectors themselves. Additionally, getting them to line up with a camera is more complicated:
Copy and keep keyframes as before, note the FOV of the camera and put that into the projector, hang the projector off the camera and zero-out its position. “Path” positioning may be on by default. I can’t remember, but having that off is good.
Also! With old projectors you cannot make a matte output and even if your geo is 100% transparent, the projector will still show up 100% opaque, so if you are using this method you’ll need to make a copy of everything to generate the mattes. (Update: this last paragraph is wrong now. See Joel’s correction below)
4 Likes
one thing that does drive me crazy with Flame projections is the thing you describe where you copy the camera and manually delete the keyframes. In Nuke, you can just apply a holdframe node to your camera and create projections at different frames and if you need to update your camera (like if you’re comping something shot zooming anamorphic on the end of a Russian Arm that has like 10 updates to the tracking - true story) then you can just change the one camera node instead of recreating all your held frame cameras.
2 Likes
100% agree. There was a feature request so old that I can’t find it anymore, but it was exactly that: “project from this camera, this frame” added to the drop down.
I’ll get another one posted and all of us projection enthusiasts can vote it up!
3 Likes
@andy_dill old projectors can output mattes now in the action output under ‘projectors matte’ just a fyi
7 Likes
!!!
(This is exciting news!)
1 Like
You can also stack up multiple old projectors on the same geo, using mattes for the hold frame layers…you can use the geo layer priority editor to also order old projectors layering order.
Don’t forget also, If using old projectors, they default to a z value that is not zero…used to be 500 I think…so you have to set that 0.
I recently had to do maybe a similar thing in terms of the camera move you mention.,a big pull out…This case was to remove a car from a road, shot from the back of a camera car following ahead at speed…in this case, rather than have a really massive resolution Hold frame, used coverage areas with smaller resolutions that meant a nested approach…worked fine by getting the first coverage area projected in a base action, then duping that action downstream and blend in the next coverage area to be painted and projected…and keep repeating that until the end of the shot…a kind of recursive projection+paint process over the same geo…
You can use a resize node after each action iteration to create a high res hold frame to maintain detail resolution…
One of the major benefits of doing it this way rather than in nesting in one action, is you can bespoke paint your blends in with each reprojection iteration, as you see fit.
3 Likes