How to Remove Tracking Markers in Blender | Blender VFX Tutorial

[Music] hey guys welcome to another vfx tutorial on the channel today we're going to be learning how to remove markers from the scene in a basic vfx shot so let's go and get started now like always all the files i use are in the description below to download now i do highly recommend that you uh do your own footage however because you'll learn a lot basically uh just follow kind of try to do the same thing that i'm doing on this video up on the screen right now the only thing that you want to do is just make sure that your markers can be seen uh very high contrast so i have black markers on a white canvas you also want to make sure that your actual floor or floor plane or whatever is a very solid color you don't want any patterns or anything because this method won't really work so just one solid color and that should work anyways let's go ahead and get started i'm gonna come here go to the motion tracking tab uh then open up our footage okay so here's the footage i'm just going to open that up then first thing that we want to do is come over here and set the scene frames and pre-fetch our footage just so it's easier to play back and everything i have tons of motion tracking tutorials linked in the description below so if you want to go check those out make sure to go down there uh but next we can actually go ahead and set the match to previous frame normalize and then we want to set the correlation to be a point nine uh so that's all looking good and this scene is super easy to track uh just because we have all these nice little markers right here uh so let's just uh control click all these uh now we won't worry about the size yet because we'll actually just make all of the uh markers have a larger size and we are staying on the location uh motion model so that is all looking good so then we can just select a s to scale up like that uh just so we have a little bit more space to work with all of our markers and everything then just a to select all those and then we can hold ctrl and t to go ahead and let those trackboard okay so all my markers got to the end clip and that's because i prepped my footage and everything i had no like motion blur or anything i had very little handshake and everything uh so that is looking good we can go ahead and solve i'm just gonna set my amd keyframe to be one two one hundred uh just play around with that uh for your own footage uh you wanna see where you have the most parallax where the markers move the most uh that's where you wanna set your a and b keyframe and then we're gonna refine the k and uh k1 k2 and the focal length and you can see i got a solid error of 8.3 you want to try to get that as low as possible if you're using your own footage uh anything below a 0.3 or anything is really good so you want to try to get it as low as possible so we have that set up we now need to set up our tracking scene so let's just hit that right there and now you can see up here that we actually have our uh little cube and everything in our scene so that it's looking good uh you'll see that it's not really orientated here are our points and here are our cube and stuff so it's not really on the same plane where they need to be so let's just select this one this one and this one you want to try to form a 90 degree angle and then set that as your floor now you can see that they're more aligned let's just go into the camera view and then we need to hit we'll select this one to be our origin point and then this one will set our y-axis like that uh let's just put the origin in the middle then final thing we just need to select two of these hit set scale and i'm just going to bring this out a bit now if i was actually doing this for real i would you know of course measure the points in between to get the exact distance but this is just an easy tutorial so we're not going to worry about that so basically we have all of our stuff set up now uh we can actually come out to the layout tab uh and we can see that we have all this set up uh let me actually come up here go to motion tracking just so we can see our markers now uh so if i hide this you can see that our tracking markers are there and they do correspond in the camera okay so the next thing that we need to do is to actually go ahead and prep up our scene i'm gonna go ahead and delete this uh collection that it created and then also it created a background view layer as well just gonna delete that and since we deleted both of those we can actually come out here to the compositing tab and we don't really need these four nodes right here uh you can just go ahead and delete those since we just deleted both the view layer and collection now we just have a basic uh scene set up inside a blender in the compositing tab and everything so now we can actually go ahead and get started uh adding in some 3d objects and everything now i'm going to keep it simple i'm basically just going to have two characters kind of fighting each other and stuff now if you downloaded the link in the description you can get all my files i'm using here but if you don't uh if you don't want to pay for all my files you can just come here i used if you just type in in mixamo this is a nice adobe thing that you can use i use set uh fist fight a and fist fight b and then you can select your different characters i believe i just use some of the default characters of this guy and i believe uh where is he this guy right here so if you want to copy that uh you can copy that as well also the hdri i'm using is right here link to that is in the description below if you're interested okay so to actually go ahead and import those in let's first of all delete this cube then come up to file import uh fbx then you basically just want to locate wherever you save those mine are here so we're gonna do a first and then we're gonna do that same exact same so import fbx uh then we're gonna do beat right here and now you can see that both of them are in but they aren't really aligned or anything and so you might uh be wondering how you actually align those guys and everything uh the easiest way i found for this specific one is to actually find a point where their fists connect or they're supposed to connect or whatever and so if we play this animation and stuff you can see that one of the guy punches right here or kicks you can see that it's supposed to connect right there so that's just an easy way we can kind of link up the two and everything so let's uh first of all just select this guy uh i'm gonna go ahead and scale all of these guys up a little bit uh so just hit a and then deselect all of the ones that aren't the actual models and everything then just s to scale those guys up just a tad now that we know where they kind of connect and everything we can actually go ahead and start rotating them and everything so first of all let's just get this guy and his mesh you want to select both the armature and the mesh then we're just going to rotate him on the z-axis so press z and then uh 180 degrees and then we basically just need to uh position him where the foot is supposed to connect so uh g shift z right there and we can kind of see there we go so that is looking pretty good uh we also can see that he kind of punches right here so another way to just make sure your models line up and everything is to kind of just come over here and we're going to make sure that his fists so you can see right here his face is supposed to hit his stomach so we're just going to position him right there and that should be good enough um these guys are pretty pretty easy they don't really touch that often so we just got to make sure that when they do it looks good so that is looking good in my scene i will notice that we have them kind of misaligned i'd rather them be rotated a different way but we don't want to rotate before because that'll mess up the alignment with two so now we have this guy selected let's select this guy and then we're just going to rotate both of them on the z axis let's try 90 degrees like that i like how that looks a little bit better so now we actually have everything set up with the guys let's go ahead and come into the uh render view you will notice that we are still on ev so let's come over here go to cycles go to gpu compute and i'm basically just going to set up all my settings if you're interested in all the settings i use there's a link down in the description below that you can watch where i go over all my settings the final thing you want to make sure that you have is come down to film and make sure that transparent is turned on just so we have that little shadow uh catcher down below uh you will notice that he looks kind of transparent and that's there's something weird that happens when you import and uh fbx sometimes let's come to the shading tab and to fix that we're just gonna come down here and unplug the alpha uh and so that should fix it i don't know why it does that sometimes it's just something annoying you gotta always check okay so now let's actually view what we have so far we have the camera tracked and everything and then we can see our little models uh fighting and everything down here it's real nice easy way to get some free animation and everything uh real fast uh so that is looking good we can kind of see that their animation stops around 114 so i'm going to go 114 down here just so we don't have them just standing there and everything uh so now what we can do is go ahead and mess around with our lighting of our scene so let's just go ahead and first delete our light that was already inside of blender we're just gonna start from scratch uh now we need to go into the shading tab into the world settings because world is where we're going to mess around with our hui we can press period to go to where our nodes are uh then we're just going to hit shift a we're going to add in an environment texture and then again the link to my hdri i'm using is down in the description below right here uh and then you do want to make sure it's aligned to your scene uh for my specific one i made sure that this hui is matched uh to the lighting of my actual scene i worked in but let's go ahead and change this to scene world just so we can see that hdri inside the material preview if i go to my video clip and then uh go to camera camera setting background images and make the opacity up we can actually see that our lighting is coming from over here in this direction whereas now the lighting in our hdri is coming from this direction so what we can do is we can notice that we have these two lights right here so what we need to do is go ahead and hit ctrl t that'll add a mapping and texture coordinate then we basically just need to rotate that until it's the right way so let's just rotate that until it's like right there and now if we go ahead and render an image we can see how that looks okay you can see that my lighting now matches a lot better uh than before we will notice that the motion blur is a little too intense uh right now and that's to deal with the scale of the actual scene uh this is what i was talking about earlier if i was doing it for real i'll make sure that the scale is actually correct and everything but we can just mess around it for now and kind of fake that a little bit so let's just turn the motion blur down uh just a tad uh and let's give that a render okay so that is looking really good however you will notice that we still have our tracking dots in the scene so let's actually go ahead and kind of talk through how we're going to get rid of those basically the method that we're going to use is to actually take this area we're going to isolate a tracking dot so with this black area we're going to isolate that and then we're going to make a mask so it just moves with the actual dot and then what we can do is take that mask and then add a section over here if you think of it as like a clone brush it'll take whatever over here and move it over here and then if we blur it and everything it'll look like it's actually in the scene and everything so that is the method that we're going to be using let's let's go ahead and work on that okay so like i said before we actually need to make a little mask for wherever our tracking uh dots are so what's easy is that we actually have the tracking dots into our scene uh so let's come over here to the motion tracking tab you can see that all of our tracking markers uh already have dots on them so that is really good what we can actually do is uh hit a to select all of these and so we can select all of those and then actually set those to be in our 3d viewport if we come over here to this geometry we can do 3d markers to mesh and that'll actually make a mesh of where the markers are so if we come to the layout tab we will now see that we actually have this tracks right here and if i move that around you can see that we actually have vertices now wherever the tracking dots are so that's really good we're going to go ahead and add in a little sphere this sphere is basically just going to active as our mask so let's just move that out of the way first of all we're basically going to be making a particle system for wherever those tracking dots are so what we need to do is go ahead and shade in our sphere we're going to make a new material instead of principle bsdf we don't want any shading on this we just want a simple black and white movie clip so we're just going to come here and then go to the emission and then we're just going to set our color to be all the way white so that is looking good now we just need to come down here and select our little tracks i'm going to go ahead and get rid of our tracking just because that gets in the way sometimes so let's select our tracks we're going to come to the particle settings add a new particle system i know i want the particles to be on the dot and not move and to be spawned at the very first frame so what we can do is do all those uh we'll just kind of walk through it uh so first of all we want all the dots to spawn on the first frame so let's just hit uh zero down here and then end at zero so they'll all be spawned in uh at keyframe zero basically the lifetime is going to be 250 just however much you want you just want it to be over your actual frame in so mine is 314. so we just want it to be over there now down here we actually need to set it to be our little ball that we created so render as we're going to hit object and this object is going to be our sphere over here so that is looking good we can mess around with some of this stuff later so now if i can actually go to the start of the clip you will notice that we don't really have anything right now uh it's kind of weird and everything so what we can do is actually come here we're going to go up until it says source right here and it says emit from faces right now since we don't really have any faces that's why it's not really spawning correctly so we need to set that from faces to vertices and now if i go into the camera we can actually see that we have the spheres in the actual vertices on our tracking markers so that is looking good now we will see that we have duplicates and everything it won't really matter too much but what i'm going to do is just going to go ahead and set it down to 13. we can see that you all also notice that some of the markers have now lost their actual dots on it and that's because we actually have this random order on so if i uncheck that now all of our dots should have a marker on it you will notice it's not covering up the whole marker and everything so we actually need to scale that up a bit let's go to the render then we're going to scale that up until they're right around there you just want to make sure encapsulates the uh the whole marker and everything you can kind of come throughout your clip and just make sure oh we actually have something wrong we can see that the particles and everything are actually being affected by gravity we don't want that we just want them to stay still in the air so to do that we're just going to come down here to the field weights then turn gravity all the way off and so now they should just stay in midair like that and so that is looking good they still are doing a little bit of drifting and that's actually because we have some velocity in the particles uh let's just come to the velocity tab we can see that we have a one meter per second on the normal we just want to change that down to zero okay so now we can see that we have all of our particles uh spawned right here so that is looking good if i go ahead and render out this little animation real quick uh you should see that we have number one we still have our characters in there uh so we need to get rid of those but you can see that this color that we selected is pretty much a pure white it's not affected by shading or anything so that's what we want i'm gonna go ahead and make a new collection for our actual characters so we can turn that on and off uh pretty easily so we have a collection here i'm just going to put both of these armatures in here and then we also have to put in some of the meshes and everything into there so just put those in there and now if we turn them off uh we should see that they're no longer going to be rendered so that is looking good now we also need to put the ground in that collection as well and then finally we can see that here is our render result but if we go and render this out you will notice that we have all of the things but we also have our background so we need to go into the compositing and then we just want the render layers to be composited so just uh do that and then to save us a little time i'm just going to come up here and instead of in cycles uh since this is such an easy animation we're just going to render this in eevee and that should uh make the render time way less you can see that it's now below 2 seconds so that's really nice but we pretty much have it all set up now we need to make sure our frames are correct and then we can go ahead and render this out this is basically just going to be a sort of mask animation so we're going to just going to go in here name this whatever you want i'm just going to name this mask for me i hit accept and then we can turn this to ffmpeg video uh mp4 and then high quality like that and you will notice if we go ahead and render out an image you will notice that we have transparency however if we uh render it as a mp4 file then it'll fill in the transparency to be black uh and so that's what we want so that's why we're not really messing messing around with the film transparent uh so now we can actually go ahead and render out this animation uh to use into our compositing okay so just finished rendering here's the result that we got we basically just have some white markers moving around our scene and everything looks pretty cool by itself but now we can actually go ahead and start combining some of that and compositing uh and remove some of our tracking markers so let's just come back out of here we're gonna go back inside of cycles uh and then we wanna get rid of these tracking markers so let's just uh open this up this panel right here and then we have this right here we can just hide that from the view and also the render and finally we gonna bring these guys back uh just so we have these guys back in our scene now let's actually go to the compositing tab and start to composite some of this stuff in so first of all attach the render layers node here and then this to the composite now i always like to hit this convert to pre-multiply that just helps with the alpha channel now we actually need to go ahead and start getting rid of some of these markers and everything okay to get started in removing these markers we're going to go ahead and import in our mask that we just made so let's go search this uh go to up to movie clip we're going to import that in so here is mine just going to open that clip up and so here is what it looks like in our thing so we can actually use that as a factor in a alpha over node to uh kind of utilize that so we're just going to drop in like i said an alpha over make sure com pre-multiply is checked then we're going to plug that into the factor and then the movie clip is going to be plugged into both of these image sockets right here now if we view this you should notice that nothing has really changed and that's actually because we haven't translated the movie clip over to kind of occupy this space so what we can do is just going to add in a translate note like here we're going to do that in the bottom socket i believe and then we're just going to mess around with this x value until we basically remove these markers like that let's see how this looks uh so that looks pretty cool you will notice that uh we do still see the markers and that's kind of a weird thing uh that happens with this movie clip node basically all that means is that uh these values aren't pure white this is kind of like a grayish like slightly gray so what we need to do is gonna go ahead and add in a color ramp we can just plug that in right there uh let's go ahead and view that we're basically just gonna crank this white all the way closer to black and that should clip this to be more white and so now if we view this we should see that the markers have actually disappeared and now we can see this nice little kind of halo effect going on right here and so to get rid of that first of all we can go ahead and make the circle a little bit larger since we didn't make the sphere as large as we needed it to be so what we can do is going to go ahead and add in a dilate in a road node just right here and we can actually make that uh let's make it right here maybe just going to puff those out a little bit more this is before and then this is after that dilated road node you can just see that puffs it out a little bit just so we have more area to work with and then finally we need to go ahead and add in a little bit of a blur that'll get rid of these edges and make it look uh more like it's in the shot and everything so let's just add in a blur node gonna move this up uh let's try 10 um 10 is pretty small yeah so that gets rid of most of the edges i'm actually going to go up let's try let's see if we can get away with it uh 20 might need to go down a little bit though that's looking pretty good uh just for the sake of mind i'm going to go down to a 15 just in case it kind of clips the edges and stuff so now you can see that the markers have basically disappeared from our scene so if we kind of scroll out through here we can see that uh we no longer have the markers in our scene and kind of looks like uh for the most part that our markers aren't we're never there and everything so this is why we filmed a black marker on a white canvas and everything this is why we needed it to be a solid color instead of the pattern or anything just because a solid color is better to actually move and translate that image over and everything so uh basically now we have everything done we just need to composite it all together so i'm gonna have this over here let's uh add this alpha over over here plug this alpha over into this one and now let's just give this a quick little look uh you should notice nothing is happening and that's actually because we need to render out an image okay guys so we have everything correct uh one little thing that i noticed is that the shadows don't really match in our scene so just for the sake of this vfx shot i'm going to go ahead and add in another point light just to act as a shadow caster so let's just add that in kind of let's bring that up a bit then we're just going to increase the power like that just so we have some nice little shadows in our scene okay so that's pretty much it for this tutorial the final result is playing on the screen right now uh now for my final i actually took uh took it into after effects and added some noise onto the characters and everything just to kind of blend it in more with our scene but as you can see we got a pretty nice result with not that much effort and everything this is kind of just a nice little way to actually remove some markers on our scene and it actually leads to better motion tracking and everything so i highly recommend this method if you have areas that are hard to do it really just helps you a lot inside of the effects when you can take stuff out and add it in later or anything like that but anyways guys that's gonna be it uh for this tutorial uh we have a patreon and a discord links to those are in the description below but anyways guys thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you guys later peace

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 18,040

Keywords: how to remove tracking markers in blender, blender vfx tutorial, remove tracking markers blender, blender tracking tutorial, camera tracking in blender, blender camera tracking tutorial, how to make vfx in blender, easy tracking marker removal in blender, easy blender vfx tutorial, remove markers in blender, how to do vfx in blender tutorial, blender vfx tutorial beginner, beginner, vfx tutorial blender, vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, vfx, camera tracking, motion tracking

Id: 6UYJTYpjuxA

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021