Digital Commons at Penn State

Camera mapping is a technique I first learned about at the NAB Show 2008 in Las Vegas. After seeing the technique demonstrated I immediately recognized the power of knowing such a technique and decided to commit myself to learning the skills necessary to achieve it. If you haven't heard about Camera Mapping or Camera Projection I will illustrate what it is and how it works.

Camera mapping is a process where we can use a simple photograph and turn it 3d, this allows us to setup camera movements and fly around this life like 3d image without the expense of all the rigging that would be necessary to create such shots in the real world. Camera Mapping is used extensively in Television and Feature Film production as a cost effective way to create background mattes, and establishing shots among other things. The process requires extensive use of Adobe Photoshop and some basic 3D, in my case I used Cinema 4D as the 3D application.

I recently received a copy of Cinema 4D and immediately began working on my first Camera Map, I would like to share that process with you here. To start I found an image of Penn State's Old Main building (picture right). The first thing I did was use Adobe Photo Shop's clone tool to remove the people out of the image, I also removed the metal globe in front of the building. I removed the globe because it is a complex structure to model in 3D and this is again my first attempt. Then I proceeded to deconstruct the image by pulling out the bell tower, part of the roof, and the columns at the front of the building. I placed each one of these elements into their own layer. I then fill in the missing data behind the removed elements using the clone tool again. See the images below as an illustration of what I removed from the original Image.

That about does it for Photoshop, next I rebuilt Old Main in 3D using simple cubes and cylinders, here is the wire frame(picture right) of what I created in 3D. Also notice that I have a camera in the composition, I can use this camera as a projector to project the images onto the wire frame. The images will then stretch around each building block that I used to reconstruct Old Main and will look photo realistic. Lets take a look at how this image would look with the rendered images put in place.

Notice that the images look bad around the sides of the building but look good at the front of the building, this means that there are definitely limitations to the types of shots that I can render out with this camera map. Take a look below at what I was able to render out of this Camera Map.

View this youtube video to see more examples of Camera Mapping.