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i've been working on a project for school in which i emulate the Bust A Groove music game from the late 90s. i have a blog about it in which i post updates and videos on the project. what do you guys think so far? i have untill about mid march to complete it.

I like the idea it must've been lots of fun getting the video footage for the dancing

I'd love to put some comments on the work but what I find hard to do is to mention stuff you maybe are planning to do in the future, or that you obviously already know of... I don't have a hint what you are aiming for the final result but here's some stuff that would really add to the work:

The first thing you notice when you make a compositing is that you will not have any shadows in your 3D scene. Your characters will look a lot like they are floating so what could be done, but would be tedious... you would have to make an animation, with planes or whatever you like, that matches the dancers moves, and make a shadow pass so your characters would have shadows.

While you may want to make it look like the game, the camera movements are really linear and hard, there's no ease-in/ease-out. Especially on the drop down in the beginning, I think the cam could go slowly into a settle instead of going straight to his final position and stop like it hits a wall. The side dollys are looking fine though, it goes well with the beat.

When you go from side to side, you may want to track the feet of your dancers, and make them match the movements of your cameras, to eliminate more slidings

Watch for your camera cuts, I noticed in the end that your particles have a kind of pop when your camera goes back in front of your dancers.

Now... I mentionned some big points and I'm guessing you probably know about all that stuff already but that's all I can think of commenting on... I know it's hard to composite and and I also completely ignore your background into that stuff so I'm mentionning the least I can If you already knew about everything then you,re off to a good start with that and keep it up

yeah, besides the stuff i haven't gotten to yet (or am putting off to do if i have time), there's a lot of things where i just had to cut corners to save time (and my sanity). i'm decent in Maya, but i learned how to use it in Maya 3 during high school. so now using Maya 8, there's probably a ton of stuff that is now possible, and tons of other stuff that is now way easier. i was never a pro, but have the basics down alright. i have a few books helping me out, but i use them more as resourse look-ups than any kind of tutorial.

in high res and at proper aspect ratio, it doesnt look too bad actually. but if i have time, what i planned to do was just duplicate the video, turn it entirely black, distort it into place, gausian blur, and presto! simple shadows.

yeah the camera movements are a bit mechanical, but thats also the way they are in the game. the intro clip i might change around a bit, but i spent too much time getting the others to work together as it is, so those are pretty set.

i tried as best i could to match it up, and it is pretty good. you don't see the small slides unless you watch it several times or REALLY look for it. the issue lies in the fact that the camera movement in Maya moves as well as its aim. whereas all the subject in Premiere is doing is swivel, distance to camera, and screen position. i set a start/end keyframe set, as well as one in the middle to try and help with going along with BGs camera movements.

yeah, thats just an inherent problem with the way i chose to do the project. i couldnt figure out how to incorperate video layers into Maya (or 3D into premiere) so they are separate entities. to make it as simple as i could, i rendered out loops from the different angles and the 10-frame camera sweeps. since the repeating element is fire, its reletively random, and the hiccups in the loops arent that noticeable (and should be even less so once all the overlay graphics are on).

by all means man, any critisizm is welcome! i'd love to hear things i can improve on; its the only way to get better. btw, this is really only the 2nd composite/3d project i've ever done. my first one was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61NG1vgCouA completed in about 3 days of work by myself (not including prep/planning, just production of the video). that one has flaws in the keying, but otherwise the transitions from 2D to 3D were pretty solid, IMO.

dunno if anyone is still interested, but i have updates on the project on http://www.ampacket.blogspot.com

I've done something really similar both in terms of compositing and 3D art/video, what program are you using? from what I can tell from your title screen it looks to be AE, I'm just being too lazy to read so I'm guessing you've mentioned it at one point

Everything you've done looks pretty good so far, I like your ideas and the music matches up with your video well, a few crits I do have is that your ligh trails dont seem to be tracking very smoothly, like they arent flowing as well as they could be, and that although you keying of your dancers is good, its pretty obvious its a composite (I know its difficult to not make it looks like one ) but maybe try some colour correcting on them? some motion blur? Try to get them to blend a little more with your environment.

I've played a few emulators of this game. Be sure to post up here when you're done!

only a few things in AE. most of the grunt work is taken care of in Premiere. the backgrounds were made and rendered out in Maya. yeah i know the light trails are blocky a bit (they also don't rotate to match glowstick position), but i was on a time constraint and couldn't really spend much more time on it. because of the fast hand movements and the fact that they sometimes go behinds, autotracking is pretty much useless. i had to hand track like every ~3 frames for nearly a minute......

the keying could be better. i really didnt use any advanced techniques, just % off color and feather. it could have probably helped to color correct too; i put none on >_< the footage was shot under pretty blaring tungsten lighting and it seems to show. but oh well.

anyway, here's the final product i turned in last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngVBanTg5i4&fmt=18

That's some pretty nice work there... Quite incredible...