Easy Camera Tracking With After Effects - AE2Blend - Blender

camera tracking one of the most common techniques in the VFX industry but also one of the trickiest ones to make so in this video I'll show you one of the most easiest way to start making camera tracks with After Effects and then exporting it into blender with the plugin after effects to blend and also I'll tell you some advice about how to film a proper shot for best results and make your life a little bit easier I screw some projects in the past so you can learn from my mistakes so let's get started first things first what is the proper way to film a shot for camera tracking all you need to have in your scene are tracking marks in movies when a scene was filmed using green screen usually they add these little dots X's or triangles these are the tracking marks which they're going to help After Effects knowing if the camera is moving rotating panning tilting and along Etc so in our cases if you are not filming in a studio for example in your house or outside your surroundings are going to act as tracking points and the more contrast you have in your scene the better now in the case that you have to film your wall or a surface with an even color I suggest to stick little pieces of duct tape so that way these little pieces are going to act like these tracking marks and then easily you can remove them or hide them with masks in After Effects now another thing that you have to avoid it's the motion blur these effects happen when you are recording with your camera and you start shaking or moving the camera around with some speed of velocity so the image gets blurry and gets kind of distorted the tracking marks are gonna get blurry and after effects will lose the trace of each tracking point that is in your scene so try to make smooth camera movements or you just can increase your shutter speed this second option is not the best but at least it's gonna reduce your motion blur and also try to avoid to film over reflective surfaces because of the reflection of these materials May confuse after effects in the process and if you film your shot with the sky as a background well the only thing I have to say is good luck I think it's pretty obvious that there's no way to put tracking marks on the sky and now that being said we'll start working in our shot in After Effects okay guys now that we have After Effects opened we're gonna import our shot just by dragging the file into the projects panel you're gonna see that your video will appear in the media list and now we're going to create a new composition from this same file just by clicking and dragging this video into the composition icon down here automatically it will load the video into your timeline and it's going to create a new composition using the same frame rate and aspect ratio from your original video and now that we have everything set up we're gonna go to the right panel and click to the tracker panel right away we're gonna hit the track camera button and automatically we'll start analyzing your footage just be patient is gonna take a couple of minutes and in the left hand you're gonna see that there's the 3D camera tracker effect applied to your footage there you can see how much time remains to your footage be analyzed now that the 3D camera solved is done now you're gonna see that in your footage there are a lot of access or points and these points are actually the tracking points this is one way that that you can see how After Effects is understanding your footage so if you hit play you can see how accurate these dots moves along with your camera and as you can see these dots moves pretty much well with my camera and kinda looks like they are actually in my scene but actually there's one way that you can see how well your tracking was done the only thing you have to do is click in advance in your 3D camera tracker and you're going to see that there's more information about your tracking data now you have to look at the average error right now we have 1.24 pixels of average error so basically for a proper 3D camera tracking this value must be below one pixel of average error so right now in my scene there are some x's some dots or some tracking points that are confusing After Effects doing its job most of the time when you have moving objects like the elevator doors or the same reflections of the elevator these tracking points are not aesthetic so this might contribute to the average error and now we can do two things the first thing that we can do is checking the option detail analysis this is gonna analyze your footage again and this way after effects is gonna do a better tracking job or sometimes not well not always is gonna do a better job and if you had the same problem just uncheck this option and we're gonna try a second Solution by just simply deleting the tracking points that are causing the problem you will have to be really careful and look for the X's or the tracking points that are not moving as they're supposed like these ones in the class or inside the elevator as you can see there are a lot of Reflections that may cause the problem hold shift and click the points that you want to delete or by simply clicking and holding your left Mouse button and this way you can select several points all at once and after you selected and deleted the points that you don't want to have or that may be causing the problem you're gonna see that after effects is going to analyze your camera tracking again and it's gonna happen every time you delete more and more points and be aware that this way your average error could decrease or maybe increase this is something that you just have to play around and try try to get the lowest average error possible remember that anything below 1 pixel it's great I think that you can have a tolerance of Maximum 1.5 pixels more than that number your 3D tracking could be way off so keep that in mind now that you're happy with your results my average error is not the best but I think that for this tutorial that number is good enough so the next thing that you have to do is selecting your ground by holding left click and selecting all these dots and by doing that you're gonna see that it appears something like a Target over these dots and over my ground so you have to be careful that these Target aligns pretty well with your ground so this is one way that we can tell after effects that these points that we are selecting are equal to the ground that we filmed and setting up more or less our 3D scene now we have to right click over this selection and the first thing we have to do is clicking on set ground plane and origin as I said this is gonna tell after effects that this is gonna be our origin point and now we're gonna hit right click again and we'll create a solid and a camera this way as you can see it creates automatically our camera and a solid plane in our scene and this is gonna be a reference to our real world and now what we're gonna do is rotating and scaling this plane and try to align this playing with the objects in your scene and this is gonna help us a lot when we hit play and check if the playing stays still even if the camera is moving so this way we can see that our camera tracking is good enough at this point we are already done with After Effects and now we're gonna jump into blender now in blender we're gonna use the plugin after effects to blend this one is a paid plugin that I personally think that it works completely the price only for 10 bucks you'll have almost a direct link between the camera tracking information from after effects to blender I'll leave your link on the description where you can buy the plugin and support the Creator and the way that you have have to install this plugin and actually every plugin that you want installed into blender it's pretty much easy you just have to go to the edit tab then click on preference look for the add-on Tab and hit install on this window you're gonna look for the files that you download select them and click install now that it's already installed in blender you just have to check it to enable it and now you can use it right away the only thing you have to do is select the position and orientation Ctrl C to copy and in blender just click create camera you'll have all the data transferred in just one click if you don't want to spend any money on this process don't worry you can do camera tracking inside blender as well the thing is that the same process in blender is a little bit trickier a little bit more complex but don't worry I'll show you how to make the same process inside blender completely for free with no plugins in the next video so don't forget to subscribe and hit the Bell button so you don't miss it out and now that we have the same camera animation from after effects in blender almost everything it's already set up and now we have to set up a few things in blender like the frame rate the expert ratio and the scale of the scene right now we're gonna start with the frame rate it's pretty much easy on the rack panel we're gonna go to the scene Tab and right here we're gonna select the frame rate and gonna set it to 60 frames per second and if we hit play you're gonna see that the camera moves on the original velocity and the original frame rate now we're gonna take the plane from After Effects and importing it into blender the only thing we have to do is displaying the transform tab of the track solid and shift select everything from the Anchor Point to the C rotation we hit Ctrl C to copy and now in blender we just click create plane to paste everything we copied and as you can see I automatically the plugin creates the playing exactly where it should be now we hit play we can see that everything is okay now we're gonna import our video into our camera just by selecting the camera and going to the camera tab on the right panel we're gonna go down here where it says background images and we're gonna check this tab and we're gonna press add image now in this window we'll look for our footage and we open the clip now as you can see blender automatically Imports the video in horizontal so we have to fix this the first thing we have to do is changing the aspect ratio of your camera just by going to the scene Tab and we're gonna switch these two values we're gonna set 1080 in X and 1920 in y and right now our camera sets in vertical but of course right now our footage is looking really bad so we have to fix this by going to the camera we're gonna set the rotation by 90 degrees then we're gonna change the frame method to fit and then we're gonna change the scale value by 1.78 this is gonna fit perfectly our footage with our camera and now if we hit play you'll see that the frame it's just not right it's way off that it should be and that's because of the focal length of our camera that is just not the same like the camera that we record this footage so there is one easy way that we can know what's the value of the focal length of the original camera that we used to record the footage just by clicking the 3D camera in After Effects and we will press Ctrl shift plus Y and this way we're gonna display the camera settings now here we can see the focal length that after effects detected when it made the 3D camera solving so right now we have to change the measure film size by default it's horizontally and we have to set it in vertically just by doing that we have to take the film size value and the focal length value and copy them into blender so in blend Center we change the film size to 64 and the focal length to 55.42 and this way you can see that our plane and our camera sets perfectly the same way that we had in After Effects so guys we are almost done the only thing that we have to fix is the scale of the scene as you can see our scene is way too off of scale and the only thing that we have to do is selecting the plane transform press and hold shift and click the camera transform now we press Ctrl p and we will set the pattern to object and keep transform and now we select the playing transform and we'll start scaling and rotating as you need as you can see as we scale the plane the camera is stay fixed in the same position it doesn't matter to the camera how much we scale rotate or move our plane the camera will stay in the same position and it will keep the same animation that it should once we have more or less scale the plane and the camera as it should we'll just create a new object in this case a Q and by default for blender this Cube size is 2 meters on every direction so on this panel I'm gonna change the size of this Cube and I'm gonna set it to 1.3 meters and that's almost the size of the doors of the elevator and now with this reference with the real size word object I'm gonna still scaling and rotating my camera and playing and put it as it should from this point now you guys have everything set up for start making VFX this is everything you need to know to start making VFX and now it's in your hands and Imagination to start creating something unique and something amazing for your 3D shots so that's it guys from this point now you have everything set up to make any kind of bfx that you can imagine something like Montage an object character animation or fluid simulations thank you guys for watching this video I hope it helped you to improve your work making VFX what kind of crazy things you'll make now that you know how to make camera tracking in the basics of bfx I want to read all your comments here down below leave me a like if you liked the video or if you learned something new today subscribe to the channel and hit the Bell button so you don't miss any of the videos we have loved in the future you can support this channel sharing this video with the people you think this information could be helpful follow us on our social networks like Facebook Instagram and Tick Tock as well on my Instagram Tick Tock and Spotify accounts thank you for watching this video and remember that this is xvia studio cinematica and I'll see you on the next video foreign [Music]

Channel: Exvia Studio Cinematica

Views: 32,125

Keywords: Exvia Studio, Exvia Studio Cinematica, VFX, Vfx tutorials, Vfx for begginers, Blender Tutorial, After Effects tutorial, Camera tracking tutorial, camera tracking after effects, Easy camera tracking in after effects, export 3d camera tracking from after effects to blender, AE2blend, Ae2blend addon for blender, Easy tutorial, camera tracking for vfx, how to make camera tracking for montage, how to make camera track for 3D scene, 3D

Id: 4sA2iwEPRCs

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023