How to Geometry Track ANYTHING in Blender

today we're going to be learning how to track geometry inside blender which opens up a realm of possibilities for visual effects like always if you want to work along with us I have everything I use down in the description below okay so inside blender there's an amazing add-on called the geot tracker add-on by Keen tools uh we just want to go ahead and download that it's an amazing add-on I highly recommend you guys uh check them out and donate if you can so just uh come edit preferences add-ons and then you just want to install the add-on where of you have the zip file and then you should see it pops up with this uh you just want to kind of go in this and it'll be uh some things that you have to download like the face Builder the geot tracker and all that and then finally you just want to make sure it's checked right there and with that um you also might have to restart blender um to make it take effect but with that if you hit in you should see that we have this geot trctor section right here so let's go ahead and create a new geot tracker and you can see it's automatically set it up to be our Cube object we don't really want that uh so let's go ahead and delete the cube and the light so just delete those two things let's come in the camera view since we need to import our clip in our scene so I'm going to come up here to the the background images go to uh background images down here add image movie clip and then uh locate our footage now I went ahead and converted my footage into a PNG sequence just so it's a little bit easier to work with so I'm going to hit a to select all this then open the clip and now you can see it's uh the background of our video which is going to help us out a lot so let's just select this to be our footage right there and then we also need geometry now in order to actually make the geometry of your scene uh you're going to have to take some photos of your actual object you can see I took two pictures uh profile of my object and then the front view of my dog and I use both of those as reference images to actually model out my dog so I'm not going to be going over that since it really comes down to uh your specific object that you wanted motion track but you do want to make it as close as possible so let's go ahead and import that in into blender uh in order to fill this out so it has a uh fbx file so I'm going to import in the fbx so here it is I'm just going to click it import the fpx and then uh I actually have some key frames down here so I'm going to go ahead and X and delete those just so we are working with a static model and then we can go ahead and select this geometry to be our dog and now we have all these extra settings that pop up the first thing I want to do is actually go ahead and set up some of the camera settings that I know uh so the focal length I shot at was a 26 just because I was using my iPhone and uh the sensor width and height I'm just going to leave like that and it is a fix lens I'm not doing any Zoom or anything so that is that and then we also need to analyze uh the footage so I'm going to go ahead uh and analyze that you should see that it says uh analyze there mine said reanalyze since I've already done it before but you just want to hit analyze if it says it right there okay so once the analysis is done we can actually go ahead and start tracking our object to our actual dog now I want to find a place where kind of we can get the most detail out of her so I'm going to go ahead and go to the uh we'll say the middle of our footage so like right here when to our head is actually pretty lined up with our scene and that's actually because I did in tutorial uh before and you know was just testing and so I'm just going to start around frame 55 right there so I'm going to go ahead and go to the start pin mode and then as you can see it's really really close to where she is I'm going to go ahead and just create a few pins to kind of uh get some bearings in our scene so I'm going to set a pin at the tip of her nose and then maybe one above her eye and then one below her eye right there and then I also need to bring this back in so click and drag that pen uh down there somewhere around there and then uh just for fun I'm going to do one kind of like where her ear kind of connects to the top of her head right there um just so we can you know have some pins and have some points of reference so that's looking pretty good and so now comes the actual tracking and this add-on is amazing for that so if you know anything about camera tracking you'll see uh recognize some of these buttons over here this is to track backwards and then this is to track forwards I just want to go ahead and track forwards first so I'm going to go ahead and uh click that and you can see with the track it basically tries to guesstimate uh the rotation and you know all that with the uh geometry data that we gave it so I just want to do the same thing over here but I want to go backwards now okay so obviously the tracking goes off in certain areas and so we do need to fix that luckily with this add-on it's super easy to fix so I'll notice that like out here um the face is kind of going all haywire and stuff so we'll go to the last frame and we actually need to reposition some of these pins in order to fit this so the nice thing is that if you click and then drag them to where they would actually be um you know kind of rotated and everything so somewhere like around there for now and then we can bring this down and then we need to position the nose over here then we'll bring this up and then we just bring that kind of up and in um like that so now it matches much better um you can of course play around with it for your own shot uh so that's what I'm going to stick with what's nice is that we can actually go ahead and track backwards again and uh kind of get that uh motion so what we're going to do is hit refine and that will basically retrack uh some of this part over here kind of in between these two key frames and hopefully it should blend in kind of the motion a little bit better we notice that it's kind of losing a little bit over here it's kind of jumping a little bit so what I'm going to do is kind of just position it again to uh my subject sh position that down and like there somewhere around there that's looking pretty good I need to bring this over just a tad so like there and then I'm just going to go ahead and refine that and hopefully that should get some of the Jitter out okay you can see that's much better now um of course it still is jumping in places and this is where it really comes down to your manual key frames so you just want to kind of go to places where it kind of jumps you know you can see there it kind of jumps a little bit and so we want to try to get that out as much as possible and you can see this uh this is a point down here that's really giving us trouble so we can see it follows and then it kind of jumps there we don't want it to jump there so I'm going to set a key frame right there and then when it jumps I'm going to set the key frame kind of back up to where it should be so kind of somewhere there like that so now we have uh some more key frames I'm just going to hit uh let's do the refine all now just so it can go throughout all these and kind of refine it so now you can see my motion is much smoother it still has a little bit of jit Jitter so that's where I'm going to go in and really add some manual key frames so this is where you can experiment and add your own key frames and parts that kind of Jitter so I'm going to do that process off camera but it's the same exact process I just showed you uh just with more key frames okay so as you can see we have more key frames throughout our footage and you can see it's tracking pretty well of course I would try to clean this up as much as possible but for this tutorial uh this is actually good for what I need it for finally all that we need to do uh we have it all tracked and everything you can see that it's already added key frames on every single frame so all that we need to do is just uh come out and exit out of pin mode and now you can see that we have our object uh tracked in our scene and it's moving around you can mess around with all these settings over here um if if you need to like orientate the object or you know smooth it a little bit I'm not going to go too much into detail on some of those since that's getting more kind of advanced level we're trying to uh stick to the beginner side of things and so now what we want to do is go ahead and put some things on the dog again it's kind of whatever you want to put on your object uh so for my scene I just went ahead and downloaded some objects uh from free on some sites so I have the links down below if you want to download some of that let's just go ahead and import some of those in the scene so I'm going to go up to file and then append and we're going to locate those okay so this glasses blend I'm just going to click inside there then go to the object properties I'm just going to hit a to select all these and Ain that into our scene uh now you can see that we have all these objects up here we don't need this plane the camera or the light it created we just need the glasses and as you can see it's not parented so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and select this uh this and then this object so just all those glasses object and then make the uh kind of outside the yellow part and then uh contrl P to add that as an object so now everything kind of follows that and then finally we what we want to do is let's come uh let's try to find like a frame where the dog is kind of you know as straight as possible so like this so with the dog selected I'm going to select the uh the camera and then if we hold contrl P I'm going to parent that to the camera so now that we have uh the camera parented to the dog we can move that and the most important thing is if we go into the camera and we move the camera around you'll notice that our dog head always sticks uh to our camera path so that's really nice what we want to try to do is with the camera selected uh we want to rotate that to where our dog is kind of you know facing uh flat on every single axis so I'm going to rotate that there let's come to the other side view over here and I'm going to rotate that just so he is straight so somewhere right there and then also we can go to the top view and just make sure um the dog is kind of lined there too and so now we can see that we again still have our dog object looking all right and stuff but if we come to the top view um it's in the center oure SC uh scene so let's come right there and so now what that allows us to do is if we select our glasses object that we made before let's just scale that up and it's going to be much easier to kind of you know position this on the dog exactly where we want it to be so let's scale that up kind of Bring It Around Here maybe a little bit down so somewhere here let's hide this real quick I'm just going to scale that up we might need to scale it out a little bit so G or sorry s y to scale it in the y direction unhide that that's looking pretty good see if we can position it back just a tiny bit then s y again just so it's not clipping into the side of the head right there and there we go so now if I hide this you can see that's where the glasses are going to be uh on the dog of course you can place other objects like in my scene I place a hat on top of the dog I'm not going to be going over that um but it's kind of the same principle um you will notice that if we move around kind of the scene the glasses don't stick onto the object and so again we just need to parent that uh so if you select the dog or sorry let's select the glasses first and then the dog uh so that the dog outline is yellow and then contrl P again set through object and now if we finally play the image you can see that the glasses are rotating with our object and if we come here and hide our uh you know kind of tracking object we can now play the scene and you can see that the glasses are roughly following the uh you know rotation and you know movement of my actual dock okay so let's quickly set up some stuff to actually get a render in our scene so I'm going to come back out to the render view you'll notice that we don't have any lighting or anything set up in our scene uh so we want to come up here to the render properties go to Cycles then GPU compute I to set D noising on and Sample count to 64 for the viewport and then d noising off and we'll do a 256 for my render sample count uh you'll notice that the glasses are pink up here and that's actually because uh it lost the texture when we imported that in no problem at all so an easy way to get that back is to just bring out a new section over here we're going to go to the shading editor and uh for color you'll notice that you know we have this diffusion map it's of course all pink so if we click this button we just want to locate that and the name of that uh was diffus map. JPEG and here it is right here it's just wherever you downloaded your files you want to do that then open the image and now you can see that we have that uh back in our scene so if we just click that now that's basically solved the color and everything there's a few other things that are a little bit wonky here so I'm going to set the alpha back to the original right there so now that we have the correct Alpha and then also the transmission believe right there or sorry we need the uh that transmission like that and so that's basically set all of our objects to be shaded correctly Let's uh come bring that and join the areas just so we're working with that again uh now we don't see our background image anymore and that's actually because we need to set the film transparency back on so I'm going to set that to be on so now we can see the dog of course we don't have any lighting or Reflections in our scene so if you want to go ahead and download the HRI in the description below we can come and set that to be environment texture and then just open up that HRI that I have down below okay so here it is open that up and open the image now we actually have some lighting in our scene um I actually do want to play around a little bit with the materials of the glasses so I'm going to come over here go to the shading editor and then we can just uh let's turn some of this down maybe and then and maybe some of that just make it a little bit darker and I want it to be kind of more reflective a little bit you can of course play around with however you want um it to look but that's looking fine for my scene and then we can go ahead and join the areas and I do want to add some like kind of Reflections and stuff in our back in our scene so what I'm going to do just super quickly is shift a add a mesh material plane we can scale that up like so and then I'm going to scale it on the Double Y so press y twice then go to edit mode by hitting tab then I'm just going to e extrude that up a little bit so we're getting the entire scene um I actually need to push this down because I don't want it to be as close you know to our actual glasses let's just get that back up and then what I can do is uh let's one more time bring this out go to shading editor and we need to add a new material over here hit in to hide that panel if you want and then what we need to do is actually go ahead and add a image texture we can get rid of our principal bsdf plug the color into the surface and then we need to go ahead and open up our footage again so locate that okay so here's the image sequence then just hit a open the image then we can go ahead and with the node Wrangler add-on you want to go ahead and hit control T to add a mapping and texture coordinate node and put this to window instead of UV and then with that um we want to set that to be a mirror just to kind of fix the out- of- bounds area um looking thing and then what we can do is I'm going to scale this up Just One Last Time in the y direction just so we have more room to kind of you know view everything maybe in the X a little bit too and bring that up and what this will allow us to do is go ahead and get some Reflections in our scene so let's uh or actually I'll just keep this over here for now in case we do need to use it in the future I want to put this as a new collection so just right click new collection Reflections and put that plane in the reflections Collections and now if we open this up we can go ahead and set that to be indirect only which will mean that all the uh Shadow and the reflections will be seen but the actual object itself won't be seen so that's just going to help blend it in a little bit if this was kind of you know more of a rough material which uh you know let me just show that real quick so if we add a principal uh bsdf if we just plug that into the surface and let's say we turn the specular down uh and then rough this down and maybe make this black a little bit and then we'll change the transmission up you can see that we're starting to get like some of the actual reflections of our actual footage in there um so that's just kind of like a nice little touch that we can do next problem that we need to solve is of course we can see the uh actual glass kind of arm uh through her actual head so what we need to do is go ahead and set that uh kind of object that we used to track to actually affect the scene so I'm going to alt H unhide that you can see that it's basically projected a default material on that and so now that we have our object what we can do is uh we want to have some of these shadows and stuff do so what we can do is uh go to the object properties all the way down to visibility and then if you hit the Mast B Shadow catcher what that'll do is it'll keep some of the Shadows you can see some of the Shadows here and there uh and it'll actually remove the uh Parts behind uh the image as well so that's really helpful uh you know to get shadows in our scene and then also to you know affect um the actual not seeing behind the head and so we have some weird kind of Shadow issues here and that's actually because of the plane that we have back here so let's select the plane and I want to deselect Shadow or volume scatter uh and then maybe even transmission or glossy let's just play around with some of those okay so now you can see that uh you know we have some less Shadows back here and really uh this would be something where I would take it inside of nuke you know render out the shadow pass and you know affect it differently um all that stuff and that's actually what I did for my final thing but of course we're trying to stick only inside a blender so this is uh the final result that we're to get let's go ahead and uh try to composite that a little bit so hit use nodes up here save that and then we're going to go ahead and add a alpha over which is basically going to help us merge our uh footage back on top of what we render out so let's go ahead and add in our movie clip back so select that and then we can just open up the footage already since it's already inside of blender I'm going to put that um I believe below for now let's go ahead and render out a image so render image okay so we need to go back to the compositing tab now I actually got it wrong it's supposed to be uh render layers on bottom and then movie clip on top like that and so now we finally have uh this result of course you can go in and composit it to your heart's content inside of blender and then one final thing that I noticed is that we are still in the filmic uh color transform which is fine for rendering objects and stuff but it's actually uh getting the wrong color data of our actual uh video clip up here so what we need to do is render properties uh down to color management and then view transform instead of filmic we can set it to standard now the video is looking uh much more naturally uh you know colored okay so the final thing that we have to do is actually go ahead and render out the final image so that we can come up here to the output properties I highly recommend that you guys render out as a PNG sequence or a image sequence in general um just because if blender crashes then you won't have lost your progress and you can reset the frame range and everything um so just keep it on this uh we don't need an alpha Channel since we're going to be rendering the final thing um eight compression depth is fine for the camera I use so I'm going to leave it for that and then the uh compression I'm going to change down to 0% and finally um once you have it saved in a specific location you can go ahead and render the animation okay so here's the final result I did again I added a hat and uh you know play around with some of the glasses and the compositing and stuff but generally that is the workflow to get a good object track inside a blender it would mean a lot to me if you consider liking and subscribing as it would help me out with the channel but anyways thanks for watching and I will see you and the nexor

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 28,473

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, vfx, beginner blender tutorial, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, blender vfx, vfx in blender tutorial, easy vfx in blender, vfx breakdown, blender beginner tutorial, blender beginner, blender beginner vfx, geometry tracking, geometry tracking in blender, blender geometry tracking tutorial, geometry tracking vfx

Id: KvS2LZT8cuk

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023