How to Camera Track in Blender for VFX

do you find that your visual effects shots are becoming very boring and can basically be rendered as a single non-moving image if you wanted to well in today's video we're going to be trying to solve that by learning to camera track inside a blender like always everything that I use is in the video description so just go down there and download the footage we're going to be using this footage today and next thing that we need to do is go inside a blender and let's go ahead and get started now the first thing that we need to do for camera tracking is to actually go ahead and convert it to a image sequence of some sort I like to work in PNG sequences for shots I know I'm going to upload to Youtube however use whatever file type that you prefer so in order to do that inside of blender we're going to come hit this plus icon go up to video editing video editing and then we're just going to go ahead and add and we're going to select movie and go ahead and look at the movie that we did just downloaded so here it is you're just going to click that add movie strip okay so there are actually a few things that we want to do before we render this out first thing is come up here to the render properties and it should automatically select it but if you want to come down to the color management and make sure this is on standard instead of filmic that is correct color space for video and then the next thing you want to do is uh go back up go to the output section and make sure our frame rate matches the frame rate of the footage if you want to see what the frame rate of the footage is you just want to go inside of your folder and then you can come over here to your footage right click it and then go to properties details and then it should say it right here so blender should automatically set it but it's just always good to double check and so once those two things are good you can of course set your frame length and everything down here since we're just going to be working with the start of the footage I'm going to leave at 250 for now and so all those settings are correct we're just going to come to the output section we're going to go to output and we want to say a location for our file I recommend making its own folder since it's going to be rendered out as many images so we're just going to come down here I'm going to name this camera tracking um tutorial and then uh I always like putting a dash at the very end just because it's gonna basically output a bunch of numbers as the frames and so it's nice to just separate that from the main text of the file format and hit accept we're going to come to PNG is automatically selected so we don't have any Alpha in this I'm going to go ahead and turn the RGB uh on instead of rgba since we don't really need Alpha and I was just like uh changing the compression down to zero percent and then we can just come up here and render the animation okay so now that we have the footage actually rendered out as a image sequence we're going to come up here to file and just start with a new general scene that we don't really need to save that and so now we can actually get into the camera tracking Port of this tutorial so what we want to do is come up to the top up again hit the plus icon go to VFX this time and motion tracking and this is kind of just a default uh scene for motion tracking I'll explain uh some of these this is the dope sheet it's basically used for keyframes and uh and everything but I don't really use it that much um so I'm just going to go ahead and right click here and join the areas over here so we have our 3D view up here and then down below is kind of a tracking graph section uh we'll get into that in a little bit but basically uh what we want to do is just focus on this middle area this is where we want to go ahead and open up our image sequence that we just made so once you find your image sequence we're just going to go ahead and hit a to select all the frames and then open the clip and then what we want to go ahead and do is again come back up to the render properties go down to color management and by default it's set to filmic we want to set that to standard it doesn't automatically do it this time so we have to automatically or manually do it ourselves and then again we just want to come over here we can work in the 29.97 FPS uh the nice thing and the reason that we do the image sequence is because we're not tied down to frame rate basically whenever we rendered we're not going to have any issues of exporting the wrong frame rate say we uh do a camera track and 24 FPS by accident but our footage is in the 29.97 if we move it between programs it's going to be a little wonky also sometimes blender doesn't like certain video formats and so it's always just a nice rule of thumb to convert your movies to image sequences okay so now we have our scene inside of blender you can see that it's a little choppy down here you can actually see this bar is the frames are loaded in and you can see the blue ones lighter blue ones are the frames that are loaded into the sequencer so what I want to do is go ahead and pre-fetch the footage that basically just loads all the frames into our cache so now we have nice smooth playback I also want to know uh if we rendered out a longer sequence once we can go ahead and hit the set scene frames up here and that'll basically just set the end frame to be whatever the last frame of our footage is but since we did the default 250 we don't really need to hit that now for whatever reason if uh when you hit prefetch all of your frames don't get loaded that's actually to do with the memory cache inside of blender so if we come up here to edit preferences and then we just want to go into system if you come down to the uh the video sequencer you can see that we have a memory cache limit that's set to about four gigs right now I just like doing mine times two now it's gonna basically depend on your GPU and also your RAM I believe I have 16 gigs of RAM so that's basically half of my Ram right there and that it's going to allow to put the image images into that Ram so then if you hit prefetch again it should load it all the way through and you shouldn't have any choppy video okay so if you are totally new into the blender camera tracking settings uh the this uh over here are the three windows so we need The annotation you're never really going to use it's more so for just like drawing stuff on uh on here and you're not really going to use that unless you are talking with a client or something up here is the main section that we're going to be using to track the footage and then after we have tracked the footage we actually need to get a solve error and I'll kind of explain that once we get to that but first the track window if you go ahead and hold Ctrl and click at the middle of the screen you can see that we have a tracking marker and then if we have a secret search area if you hold alt s it'll reveal that and basically all this does is the middle box is the area that blender is actually going to try to track and then between the keyframes this bigger box is the area that blender is going to search for for that Exact Track in the middle so say if we go to the next frame uh blender is going to look in this whole region to determine where this box is for the next frame so let's say it moved like right here then blender is gonna uh like search in there and pick that out automatically one very important thing to uh camera tracking is knowing what size you want both of these boxes now you can either control click and then choose the size of the Boxes by themselves or what's nice is you can actually come over here to the pattern size and the pattern size is the middle box and the search size of course is the outside box and then if you change those it'll change out here I'm just going to undo what I did and keep them on the default values for now and we can always change them later let's go and delete this one but basically A good rule of thumb is knowing uh your size of the scene and what points you want to track you want to try to look for points that uh have very high contrast I actually chose this video because it's a very easily trackable scene we have nice floor plane we have nice Parallax we have a lot of detail oh and all these bricks and everything so a good point for instance would be this little point right here we can tell that it has a lot of contrast from the ground and it's going to be very easy for blender to automatically track that throughout the scene so you'll notice that the box right here is actually a pretty good size for uh these type of smaller details so I'm not really going to mess around with pattern size and the search size is where you get into a lot of trouble sometimes and since this is such a slow moving camera track then we don't really need to adjust the search size I think it's big enough but if the camera was moving faster you might lose some track sometimes because say in one frame uh the search size is here and then the next frame over you go and now it's here you'll notice that our black little dot isn't in our search area anymore so blender is going to lose that track and so all you have to do in order to correct that is to actually bring this and make it a little bit bigger say like there and now if that was the next frame over then blender would be able to track and be able to pinpoint that to there and so the only thing that you have to know is that the bigger you make the search size uh the more errors you could have say our search size was this big maybe blender would be like oh is that the uh the tracker that we are looking for since they look so similar but also uh the amount of time it takes to process that if you have a you know hundreds of trackers that's going to take a long time for blender to actually calculate so you want to try to keep it as low as possible that you need and since we're dealing with a very slow moving scene we don't need to change these uh but that's kind of the basic explanation for those uh pattern size answer size next over here is the motion model uh now I prefer for the way I like the track I never really move away from location but there are some nice things if you're doing a more complicated track where you need to actually manually set some stuff uh perspective is a nice one because you can basically say I want to uh make this you know Cube on the side and track this uh what it will do is actually go ahead and track um and basically try to move it based on perspective and uh everything uh I haven't used this in a long time so maybe try that out I'll give it a little test but for our purposes we're gonna go ahead and keep that on location for this video um now the match I always find that the previous frame uh works better than keyframe I don't really know the explanation there just with testing that's always worked out for me and then this normalize button basically that's just going to take all the luminance values of the scene so like the illuminates up here and trying to match it to the luminance here and everything so if you have like changing lights like flashing lights or you know maybe exposure changes or anything uh blender will try to basically neutralize those so it doesn't affect the track it doesn't have any errors to do that the only other setting that you really have to focus on in this window over here is the traffic tracking settings extra and so we're going to set the correlation to be a 0.9 the correlation basically means uh what bollinger's threshold is to keep a track tracking so 0.9 basically means 90 of the track is correct for blender to continue tracking the dot so if you're tracking a scene and blender uh gets to a really fast motion area and a blender is like hey I'm not so sure about this Frame I we think that it's like maybe 30 correct uh then blender will actually stop tracking at that moment so setting it to 90 basically means that blender has to be 90 sure that this track is correct for it to continue going and since we're doing so many trackers this is uh really doesn't uh matter uh setting it this High because we're gonna lose a bunch but we're also going to have a bunch more to go off of blender basically needs a consecutive tracks to track a scene however I like to have much much more uh just so blender has all the information it needs to be able to track anything correctly so the only other thing I want to call our attention to is uh this side now uh you'll see a couple uh things over here uh stabilization will want we won't worry about but footage uh if you have a different color space you want to put that there uh but I'm just going to leave it on srgb and then uh the most important section if you actually uh have your own footage or if you know any of the camera specs that you're using you can actually come over here here say you know the focal length which is a very important thing and I highly recommend if you are filming your own footage to go ahead and write all that information down including the sensor width and the focal length and all that stuff uh go ahead and write that down and if you do this you can go ahead and unplug the information in here but since this is a clip from online that I don't really know any of the data we're just going to leave that uh and I press into uh hide and unhide the window in case you don't see it okay so now that we know the basic window layout of the tracking windows we can go ahead and Brute Force our way into the camera tracking now the method I like to use is basically throwing a ton of trackers at the scene seeing what sticks and then uh just solving out all the ones that have a very low or high errors so what we want to do is come over to the detect features and we're going to click that and then we're going to come over here we want the threshold to be a 0.01 and then the distance to being 80. um I find that this works the best for the most amount of scenes uh you can of course play with the numbers but all we're really looking for is to just get as many tracking markers as possible in our scene uh this is actually a very nice scene if I come out over here hide this uh because you can see that we have a lot of depth uh here but we also have a lot of detail in the houses uh what you want to look for is a lot of uh you know depth from the camera so you want to have stuff kind of in the foreground and stuff in the background and the most important thing in my opinion is actually having a ground plane and so you can see that we have a lot of the ground exposed here and so that makes it really easy to pinpoint where our ground plane is and that'll come into later but whenever you're picking out scenes you want to have a lot of depth and a lot of variety in uh the type of environment that you have uh just because it feels a blank wall uh then there's not a lot of detail there for blender to actually go ahead and Camera track and you know track all these markers around so let's hit all H John hide everything so now that we have all of our markers in our scene we can go ahead and hit uh Ctrl t or you can come down here and press I believe this button this tracks and forward so let's just hit Ctrl T and let the uh ones go now you can see that there are some red boxes down here and those are actually uh trackers that blender has basically stopped tracking and has lost the data for and the reason that these are being lost is because they're going out of screen so that totally makes sense uh so we don't have to worry about those so now we have a set of trackers going forward in our clip I actually like to come to the very end of our clip so frame 250 and then again we can hit detect features it should automatically keep our settings so that is uh okay right there then we're gonna hit uh Ctrl shift t or again you can hit this button right here to track backwards and basically that's going to allow us to have uh trackers from the very furthest away we are from the camera to the objects and then uh the very closest we are to the objects from the camera and so that way we kind of have uh you know two sets of things you can see that they're kind of doubling up here uh sometimes and so you'll have that that's totally fine blender might honestly delete one of the ones that they don't like and so the only other thing that I like to do is to come to the middle of the footage so 142 well let's remember that number so 142 I'm going to detect features again so we can see all this data and then control t that'll track it forward so now we're basically doing the mid section so we have sets of markers where the camera is closest to the objects furthest away from the objects and kind of a middle ground so now that that's finished towards the end we're going to come back to 142 and then we're going to hit Ctrl shift T to track those backwards and so now we basically have three sets a of tracking markers uh in the beginning middle and end of our clip and that should give us a wide range of markers for blender to choose from and actually give us a solve so without solving the camera uh blender does nothing with these tracks these tracks mean nothing to blender until we actually make blender calculate where the tracks are in the scene based on how much they move and The Parallax and everything you can see these uh blue lines down here the closer we are to the camera the faster those blue lines are going to move because of Parallax again and the further away we are you can see up here like the trees down here have way shorter lines because they don't move as much and so blender is going to take all this information and actually give us a 3D scene based on all of that so let's come over here to the solve section now if you are shooting on a tripod and you're just like panning and tilting the camera you can select that and that'll block out all this stuff but since we are actually moving within the 3D space in this shot uh which is what you're going to be doing most of the time with camera tracking we actually go need to go ahead and set a a and b keyframe now A A and B K frame is basically just a range that blender uses to determine the solve and determine our scene all you need to know is that the range that we pick needs to be the range with the most Parallax and so I like manually solving uh for those A and B keyframes however you can of course hit the keyframe button if you want to let blender solve it I like having that control uh because I find that blender sometimes picks a range that isn't really the best and so I like to uh kind of come throughout my scene I'm looking for again the most Parallax I noticed that we move very fast with the camera around this I'm going to say like 140 to like 240 right here it's nice to have a long range because uh blender will actually use that uh to average the solve and so if you have a shorter range like a five frame range uh for your A and B K frames it's gonna be really hard for blender to give you an accurate solve because uh that's a very short uh portion of your video You Wanna I recommend uh no less than 50 frames for your A and B keyframe uh so right now I have a hundred uh that should give us a lot of room for blender to calculate and solve for that so now we need to refine our focal length optical center and Radial Distortion basically these are things that uh if you do set over here if you know uh say your focal length and stuff you want to uncheck that because you don't want blender to try to guess it but since again we don't know any of that information we're going to go ahead and try to get blender to refine that and give us what it guesimates uh its focal length and everything is so finally let's go ahead and solve the camera motion and this is going to take a little bit basically again uh what solving the camera motion is uh it's basically blender blender taking all the movement of all of our tracking markers and then combining that and seeing how far away that point is from the camera based on how it moves in relation to the other points so again the uh points that move uh faster are definitely closer to our image because uh that means that it's moving with more Parallax and uh in relation to the ones in the background are moving with less Parallax so they must be in the uh background um it's very confusing but it makes sense if you think of it through logically like a computer does okay so uh once you see that this uh little bar has gone away uh you have gotten a solve the solve error is right here so we got a 0.35 now that is actually a really really really good solve error I try to remain if I'm doing uh stuff uh very legit and I need a really really good camera track I try to get that below a 0.1 basically all that means is that um there is some deviation uh it's based on per pixel so right now A 0.35 solve error basically means that there might be movement of the scene within one basically 0.35 of a pixel so if we put place an object down it might move around uh 0.35 of a pixel and you might think that's pretty good but if you're trying to get a really good solve error and really good track you might be able to see it on a big screen and so what we want to do is uh below a 0.2 is really good below 0.1 is where we want to try to hit so let's go ahead and clean some of this up now blender you can come down here actually to the the graphene now and since this is such a straightforward scene you're not going to see anything uh like crazy happen but let's say you do another scene and you know this point moves a lot you can see that our graph now has updated and we basically have one point now that like is going haywire and so uh when you're camera tracking your own footage you want to look for those outliers you know I could see that this is a huge outlier all you want to do is just select it delete it uh kind of do a manual pass over what you're looking at but since I didn't really see any outliers all of them look to be following roughly within the same kind of zone so I don't see any for my scene so we're just going to keep that all um like unmessed with and everything again you want to do a manual pass uh for this to get all the human error out and then after that blender can automatically do it by itself so now we want to come to the cleanup section over here and we're going to clean the tracks clean the tracks is just going to find the biggest thing with the reproduction error or the tracking frames I don't really mess with the track frames uh since I don't find that they really help with solve error the reproduction era though if I turn this up it's gonna find uh basically use this number that we set as a threshold for the amount of error that each track has so right now I'm looking for tracks that have a higher error than a 0.47 and so it's automatically selected up here for us I'm just going to go ahead and hit delete and delete delete those tracks and so now uh those have deleted the highest error track so now what we can do is we're going to come back over here I like to uncheck the refinements because we don't need to refine it every single time blender has automatically uh select selected the numbers that it thought and so we don't need it to keep uh every single time calculating that since it's most time going to be the same number so it's just wasting uh blender's resources so after we have that we're just gonna solve that again and this time with a new solve with less trackers that are uh this High solve error we should get in theory an average of a lower solve error uh that is the thing about the uh the solver it's an average of all the uh tracker errors so the solvera up top the 0.2 there are probably trackers that are 0.4 right now but there are also trackers are probably like closer to zero so it'll average out and give us the uh the 0.2 and so you can see that's automatically uh you know fixed a lot of our error um one thing to know also is if you're getting any red in this blue bar that actually means that blender doesn't have enough trackers to uh solve during that area so you'll need to add more uh trackers during that area and make sure you have you know at least again at least eight uh tracks throughout your footage for blender to be able to track it um so now that we have that we just need to clean it up again I'm going to try to get this is below a 0.1 so now all we need to do is again clean the tracks and we're going to put it you know maybe to right there the reason I'm not doing the solve error to 0.1 to begin with is uh because that would delete a lot of tracks at once I actually find that if you just skim off the top every single time that you solve it's actually going to continuously give uh better tracking for some of the markers and so if you you know go from right off the bat to do a low solve error then you're actually going to delete some good markers uh in the bunch and you don't want to do that so now that we're pretty low I'm just gonna do let's say a one uh 0.5 and delete all those the reason I can delete that many at one time is because we still have so many tracking markers in the scene uh you also want to make sure you're not deleting tracking markers that are in good areas so I noticed that a lot of the tracker markers that we selected are in like the shadow in this like kind of convoluted mess down here so they might be bouncing around a little bit some on the floor and just some in areas that we already have tracker markers around so it's not you know necessarily a bad thing about losing them so uh I want to go ahead and delete those and let's solve it one more time now the one thing that you want to look for if you're manually placing camera trackers or if you're letting blender pick them is that you want to have camera trackers kind of within the foreground a z-depth of your camera so like we have some right here and then some way in the background that just helps blender have a variety of marks to track and leads to a better solve error Let's uh clean the tracks one more time just select a few here we can start to see that we're getting to threshold where it's like a lot of them or so we're never going to really pass that threshold um so let's solve it one more time and hopefully we can get below a 0.1 with this uh now so a 0.11 is still really good that that's you know one tenth of a pixel so uh this is where I'm Gonna Leave it just gonna go ahead and save the project okay so now we have uh finally finished camera tracking now we actually need to set up our 3D scene if you come up here now uh to the part up here that we uh left up here you can see that we don't really have anything set up it's still our default scene so what we need to do is scroll down in the solve window and then you'll have the scene set up here now we can set the background that'll set the background to our camera and then the setup tracking scene that'll do a bunch of stuff but we won't have to worry about that for now right now you can see that we basically don't have or seen actually 3D tracked we have all the points here that are roughly following you know the building and the ground but uh it's now actually orientated into our scene correctly our cube is kind of just floating there and so what we need to do is to go ahead and set up some rules of our scene so the first thing I always do is set up the floor of our scene now this is a little finicky sometimes so you want to try a lot of different points so I'm going to select uh blender just needs three points on the floor plane so we're gonna select these three you want to try to keep it in like a right angle triangle that would be on the ground it doesn't need to but blender has a much better time figuring out the floor plane if it is a kind of right angle triangle so this is if you imagine just a triangle on the ground this is kind of right angle this would be this would basically make a 90 degree thing let me actually draw that so you can see so yeah so basically here are our three points you can see that right here it's basically making a 90 degree triangle uh so that's what we want uh and then let's come back over so now that we have our three points we can go to the four and uh that's basically set our four and you can see that that's actually done a really good job uh so that actually might be our floor plane but for if any reason your floor plan isn't looking correct um then you can select of course like three more points you know and try that instead but I find that the first one was actually really good and so now what we want to do is try to get our basic uh you know rotation of our scene I want to try to make this building in uh the 3D space so what I'm going to do is set this point to be our origin and then we need a reference point to be our axis so I'm going to select this one this is roughly in line with the building and stuff we can we're going to change it later so uh we can just set that to be our x-axis for now and that's roughly followed it not the best so I might honestly like select this select x-axis and you can play around by selecting some different points but that's good enough for what we need it for um so now we just need to set the scale the scene now you can get really exact um with the setting the scale uh but really I just like to set the scale up until we get like something like that something where the Box isn't too big but also not too small and so now that we have that that is pretty much our scene setup uh if we actually come up in here we can see uh we have all these tracking dots um that roughly follow the shape of the building you know you have the building here and so that's being correctly tracked and then you have a bunch of the trees back there and then of course the ground stuff right here and so blender's actually done a really good job and that's thanks to the low solve error so that's why you always want to have a saw Bearer so that is our scene uh correctly set up let's uh now we are actually done with the motion tracking uh side of things so we can come out to the layout section and let's just go into the camera now you can see that a lot of our information is gone and if you want to set up the uh scene as it was in the motion tracking settings you can actually come up here and then go to motion tracking I just select that on and then what I actually like to do is come down here and the plane axis I'm just going to change down the size of it uh so it's not as big yeah we can still tell whether where the points are so that's looking good now when we set up the tracking scene inside a blender it added a lot of stuff that really I don't like that blender does and so what I'm going to do is come up here and undo a lot of the stuff that it made so it made a couple uh collections so I'm gonna go ahead and just delete both the foreground and background collection and I also made a background view layer we're not really going to use that so I'm going to delete that uh if you do need to use it then you can always make it yourself I just don't like that blender automatically assumes I'm gonna need it and so in the compositing section we also need to delete some of these nodes these nodes are really meant for compositing um and matching the scene to blender I find if you're gonna put all that stuff all that work in you'd much rather do in another compositing software and so now this is this is what the compositing side should look like now if we go back out to layout you can see that everything is set up correctly how we want to start a new scene so a couple things that we can do in order to test our footage now that we have our camera tracked and I have our scene set up and everything is looking good we really want to make sure that uh the camera track is good right now before we do any of the 3D work so what I like to do is Select this little Cube here and then let's go into edit mode by hitting tab let me actually uh turn on the shortcuts for you guys shortcuts are down here and so again go into animode by hitting tab we can hit G then we want to move it on the z-axis so hit Z and then hold Ctrl and snap that up one unit we do that because now the origin point this little dot right here is on the bottom and so if we scale that up and down it'll always be on the ground plane that is a very very important thing for camera tracking this little floor inmate you can see is on the very ground plane of blender so that is zero on the Z you can see right over here if we move it above and down basically that means that the uh if we move it above now the ground is going to be floating in midair uh if we render it out and then the same thing if we do it below it's going to look like it's basically floating underground rendered weird or whatever we want to make sure whatever we do is on the ground plane so that's why we actually had to move our little Cube uh here so it's resting on the ground plane so now if we come over here hit H2 hide that I like to do a little test so let's actually select the cube and we want to find a point on the ground that's very noticeable and will give us like very good location data so I noticed this little white uh Little Dot right here what I want to do is g x I want to move that uh Cube to basically be touching uh right there on the side and so now if we go ahead and play our footage uh we're looking to make sure that our Cube stays with that doll on the edge with uh which it's roughly following right now it it's not the best again if I was actually doing this for a real uh scene I would maybe mess around with the tracking a little bit more but you can see for the most part it's sticking very very well uh to that that means that we have correctly camera tracked it uh you can also try that on different parts of uh the background and stuff let's select like that point right there and how I'm moving this is just G and then you hit shift Z to move on every axis besides the z-axis and then play that you can see it's sticking to that white part really really well so that's just a really good test that you can do the other tests you know of course you see all these dots and you can see that they roughly follow around the ground plane and so uh that's also looking good now uh let's actually go a step further and say we want to model out this building uh you know to act as a shadow catcher or reflection object or you know whatever um let's go ahead and you know set that up so if I go ahead and select the cube you know say I want to position it like right there um you know size it up in the Z you can see here it follows it roughly pretty well like it's actually like pretty solid um but it might not be exact for you depending on how you did your scene so let's just undo that um so what we can do is we can actually go ahead and move the camera after the fact now if you move the camera after the fact it's not really going to stay it's going to be a little bit wonky and everything so if you want to move everything that you've created into um you know at the same time say I want the edge of this house if I go to seven edge of this house to kind of be on here what I like to do to not mess with the camera at all I don't want to mess with any of the camera properties in case I have to undo what I did I want to go ahead and shift a add a empty we'll just do a plain axis right there and so that makes it empty in the middle of the same and then uh you can either parent every single object uh to the empty or what I like to do is just the camera so we just selected the camera and then make sure that the empty is uh the thing that's in yellow up here and then uh so control p is to parent and we just want to do object so now what that's done is if we just select the empty up here we can move around the empty and let's say I do something wrong and you know I've messed up my entire scene I can just delete the empty and now we're back at square one and we haven't messed with the camera at all it's all good but uh now let's actually try to get the edge of that house like I said on this kind of uh line in the origin and so uh again just with the empty selected we can move around these objects and we're just basically trying to line up these tracking markers it's not going to be perfect unless you have an amazing track but we do want to just line those up to match as closely as possible and so now we have a pretty good distinction of where you know the edge of the house is so let's just come up here to the top view again gee I'm just going to move my cube right there and so since we have the markers right there we know that the edge of the house is roughly in this area and that basically lines up uh with the camera now I might need to move it over just a little bit like there but if we come back out you can see that that still is like roughly on the same area uh where our lines are and so now uh with that defined if we move it throughout you can see that it sticks pretty good to the uh to the edge of the house we can actually go a step further and go into edit mode and just go ahead and select uh some of these and move them where they should be so again uh just tab I'm just G and then moving these on some axes and you can see that's stuck to our house really well really well it kind of loses a little bit over here which you can definitely you know change your camera track or you know do whatever you need to or you could just fake it um a little bit uh which is always you know something that USB effects artists are doing but you can see that now with that that roughly follows the same shape of the house and we got that information from free uh for free basically just by having a good track and everything uh the only other thing that I want to kind of call attention to let's go ahead and delete this so the ground plane if we go ahead and go into Cycles it's going to put on GPU compute the ground plane by default is set to be a shadow capture object which is most likely what you're going to be using if you want to change that off for any reason if you come over to the object properties into the visibility uh you have to be on Cycles by the way um you'll see that there's this Mass Shadow capture and that's actually really nice say we have you know a nice little scene uh we'll add like a sunlight here going over there uh and then we want like this Cube here I'm just gonna shift that up to be on our ground plane okay so we have this nice little scene here this is basically how you do uh visual effects um we do need to enable the film transparency and so now you can see with everything that we've set up uh with our camera tracking with our ground plane with our uh setting up the camera or the the scene and everything you can see that it's giving us a shadow catcher object we have our main object here um if we go and go ahead and render out a image uh what we did in compositing actually translates um to what we did let me actually come up here um so you can see that that has basically rendered out that and then our movie clip is being applied over top of that and so that's basically uh the gist of camera tracking uh now there is one more thing I want to go over let me actually load up another scene to show you that okay so here's an entirely new scene that I actually recently did uh for a video and the problem I had was I had all these points I had a solve error that was you know pretty respectable at a 2.24 and so everything was all right but I couldn't really have any points on the ground um like you can see there's like no data here I was basically just having like to make the floor the ceiling and so what you can do in a circumstance like this where you don't really have any points on the floor but you have a really good solve error and everything else is working out uh what you could actually do is add a few manual trackers for uh like five or ten frames or whatever and then uh use those as the floor plane so in this example let's uh come down here and you can see that we actually have like some uh things that could be trackable on the floor so what I'm going to do is uh manually add some of those tracks so it doesn't matter where I'm just gonna add like here here and here you know for instance let's just uh take all these three and then I'm just gonna track it Forward by hitting this a few times okay so now we can see that we have you know like a 10 frame range where uh it's tracked like there you don't have to do it throughout the whole clip uh so now that that's there and they're on the floor what we can do is go ahead and solve the camera motion again and uh we didn't change our solver our solve error is still the 0.24 which is very important you don't want to increase or solve error with this but now that we have these three points what we can do is set that to be our floor plane and since we have a good solver we have everything correct uh that's actually put a new floor plane into our uh footage and so that's kind of just like a hacking method uh to you know Define the floor plane if you don't have any points uh to Define it for you so again let's just come down here set origin to x-axis and let's set the scale like that so you can see that that has uh followed our floor plane if I just hide this you can see it's done a pretty good job it's a little bit uh wonky right now so you might have to you know deal with it a little bit but um that has you know gotten us very far into establishing our floor plane and so that's just kind of like a hacking method you can use to establish a floor plane so that is the full workflow and methods that I use to make my own camera track shots inside a blender I use this method for pretty much every single one of my visual effects shots and they have never really failed me um there is a lot of tinkering you have to do with it sometimes a lot of brute forcing of detecting The Trackers but as you can see with these shots on screen now you can get amazingly uh simple tracking results with this method inside a blender now hopefully you guys enjoyed this and uh let me know if there are any other tips or tricks that you have found with your own camera tracking that you would like to share I'd love to hear them and grow this community together alongside you guys anyways thank you guys so much for watching and I hope to catch you in the next video peace

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 59,990

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, motion tracking, camera tracking, blender camera tracking, blender camera tracking tutorial, how to track camera in blender, vfx, cgi, beginner blender tutorial, tracking, visual effects, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, how to make vfx for free, blender to nuke workflow, blender vfx, vfx in blender tutorial, nuke tutorial, camera tracking in blender, how to camera track in blender

Id: 5Z_VOwWoS6E

Length: 43min 36sec (2616 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023