Recently for a personal project for a new showreel, I have been doing a lot of cloth roto on a ghost character that is just a person with a bed sheet over them. now, this shot did not require a cloth roto but I wanted to do it to get more practice as I had never done any cloth roto before. after doing all of the roto on the two characters over a rather long period of time I wondered how Nukes CopyCat tool would handle it and if it would be much quicker, so I decided to give it a go and see how it would handle it and if it would be quicker. the output from this is not going to be used in my showreel, this was just something from my showreel I wanted to test CopyCat with.
this is a frame of the input sequence used for this test. the plate was provided by Peter Timberlake over on his website www.petertimberlake.com
in total, I used 14 different input frames of Roto to create this, although it definitely could have benefited from more to get a better result.
I can't remember exactly how long it took to train this model for the roto on this character, I just remember that it took a few hours to do and was a lot quicker than doing it manually myself, I do recognise that part of the reason doing it manually was a lot slower was just because the way I was working with my paths was not the greatest as I had many points on each shape which meant I had to spend ages manually moving all of the points.
This was the output after training the model, whilst it may not be the best and there are some very obvious issues due to lack of reference frames in certain areas, or the fact that it is missing motion blur in certain parts, I am pleasantly surprised with how this came out especially considering it did 206 frames of roto using only 14 reference frames.
I went into trying this with absolutely no idea how to use CopyCat or without any real expectations of how well this would work, but I was pleasantly surprised and quite happy with the outcome even if the initial result was a bit messy. this test here is my first real venture into looking into AI tools and training for use in projects and I can definitely see Nukes copycat tools being helpful in certain areas to speed up some tasks given the computer's hardware is good enough to use the model created or even to train the model at a decent speed.
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