Mapping the camera

Judging by what’s available in terms of tutorials and articles on the net, camera mapping (sometimes called camera projection) seems to be a very exotic and rarely used technique. Which is strange, when you think of the great effects you achieve without much setup at all!
Camera mapping is a way of projecting matte images onto usually simple 3D stand-in geometry. The trick is to keep this projecting camera static, while an additional camera can freely pan, tilt and even dolly to a limited extent around the image, essentially creating a virtual 3D world. If you’ve ever done a nice painting and wished you could just walk right into it, this is probably the quickest way to get you there!

Anyway, I worked through the very sparse tutorials available to me and found it was pretty easy to integrate into my workflow. Using this technique I hope to spice up my film a little, without going through the tedious process of modeling and texturing detailed backgrounds.