Mapping Image onto Rotating Object

[larrylaxdal]

I'm attempting to create a little "real life doodle" video for an upcoming presentation as a little throw-away joke. I have a video of a tower crane that's spinning 360 in a storm:

I'd like to map a face onto the front of the crane cab.

While I'm familiar with other Adobe suit products I'm rather new to After Effects, so I'm looking for some guidance on the techniques I should be using, and perhaps a few tutorials. Should I be using some sort of motion tracking, intserting some kind of 3D object, or something completely different?

Any guidance would be most appreciated!

[Mylenium]

Load the image, manually apply a corner pin effect and animate the points. This is exactly the kind of shot where fixing a wonky track will take more time than just hand-animating it, with the reason being that there is basically nothing to track - the column is mostly static, the arm will partially obscur things and the actual area of the cabin is tiny by comparison, barely leaving any space to even place distinct trackers. That and of course the simple fact that the crane rotatets, not the camera. If at all, this would likely require a ton of separate track segments which then stitching together would be a ton of work (unless you use an advanced external tracking program that has support for geometry-based tracking/ scene reconstruction). So just grab a cup of coffee and go with the manual approach.

Mylenium

[Kyle Hamrick]

We could give better advice by seeing the actual clip, but I think I probably agree with Mylenium, based on what we can currently see. This kind of stuff tends to have multiple possible solutions, and which one is the best depends on the specifics of the clip. 

Mocha is a planar tracker that can work very well for situations like this. (Select clip in timeline > Animation > Track in BorisFX Mocha.) You may or may not have enough contrast/clear edges here, but it is probably worth trying before the manual route. 

If the camera isn't moving, it may be easiest to just do this manually using the Corner Pin (or my preference, CC Power Pin) effect. In that case, you want to start at the extremes (possibly just the first/last frames) and work your way inward - let the computer do most of the work, you're just helping correct it. 

There's a variant on this where you could manually track a 3d layer to that side of the crane cab. It can be easier or harder depending on the movement of the shot, but might avoid some of the jello look you can get from a poor corner pin.

Like he said, if that crane rotates in front of the face you're adding content to, you will need to trim that away as well, which will likely be more work than is practical for a throw-away joke. 😉  It's possible you could get satisfying results using keying/extracting/mattes, since the window is black. Again, we'd probably have to see it in action to give better direction here. 

[Rick Gerard]

Mocha AE corner pin tracking is the place to start. Get a surface to stick to the front of the cab in Mocha and you can use that corner pin data to stick the face to the crane.

[larrylaxdal]

Thank you for the thorough answers! This is exactly the information I was hoping for as I really didn't even know what terms I should be searching. I'll fire things up and start playing around. 

While it's only a throw away joke on this one I'm taking it as a good learning opportunity 🙂