Last month I did a workshop at my former university about volumetric video (or free-viewpoint video). I've been working in this field for 2 years and could think of many interesting things to talk about. Now that I am finally able to share parts of it, I decided to write a short post about the process and outcome.
This workshop will introduce you to the relatively new and fast-growing medium: Free Viewpoint Video (FVV). Focused on breadth, it will cover its pros and cons, technical workflows, trends and current research and products landscape. It also includes a hands-on part about post-processing of FVV assets in SideFX Houdini. Whether you are interested in computer vision / graphics, holograms, multi-camera setups or just want to see a couple of Houdini tricks, make sure to take part in it!The workshop took 2 days (4 hours each) and both were split into theory and hands-on parts. As part of the workshop I pre-recorded all content, which resulted in a bit more than 5 hours of content. All preparations, along with execution took me around 80 hours to do, which I did on evenings and weekends. So the time to prepare everything took waaay more than expected, - half a year, vs. 2 months I initially expected. But since I haven't had a deadline and there wasn't such resource publicly available, I decided to invest a lot of effort into it.
Currently only a theory presentation is published. Hands-on tutorial, dataset and scene files can't be released yet due the business-sensitive techniques they touch on, but hopefully I will be allowed to make it public sometime in the future. It explains some pretty cool techniques!
I am quite satisfied with the result, both with its content and technical quality. I learned a lot during the process and not only about the volumetric video field, but also a bit about how companies and universities work :)
What I found interesting is how easy it is to mix-up things during live presentation. As a result of that I decided to re-record the theory part, which I considered to be done at the time, but I think it was worth it (some errors made it to earlier version of slides too). It also helped to have the content proofread and get feedback, thanks Mike, Charles and Marco for that. As with other things, with each iteration, the workshop improved a little bit.
Hopefully you will enjoy the content and feel free to share it around.