Import After Effects Tracking Data into Blender | No Plugin | Motion Tracking Tutorial

I don't think it's unknown the tracking inside of a blender is absolutely horrendous unlike in after effect where you literally press a few buttons and your footage is tracked but there isn't a free method of how you can transfer tracking data from After Effects into blender until now so let's track our footage in After Effects and I will show you how you can transfer this data to blender for free inside of After Effects let's drag in our footage and place it in our timeline then go to the effects panel on the right hand side and search for their 3D camera tracker and drag it onto our footage make sure that you open the advanced tab of the 3D camera tracker and turn on detail analysis now the computer will take a little while to analyze the footage once the computer is done if you click on your 3D camera tracker you can see that a lot of tiny tracking markers show up inside of your footage let's make these tracking markers a little bit bigger by turning up the track Point size and I will also turn on the render track points now if we play our footage from the start you can see a lot of different tracking markers showing up throughout the duration of the footage let's select a lot of different tracking mode markers on the spot where you eventually want to place your 3D models you can select multiple points by holding and pressing the left Mouse button and dragging your mouse once you have done that let's right click and click on create a new solid and a new camera what this basically does is it creates a plane on spot where we just selected a lot of our different tracking markers and it will give us a 3D camera which we can use in Blattner now we can turn off rendered tracking points and also decrease their size again because we won't need them anymore if we would playback or footage right now you can see that the plane is nicely tracked into our scene but now we will need to bring this plane and Camera from inside of after effects to inside of blender so to do that you will need to install a completely free script from GitHub if you open the link of the script that I have provided in the description don't be frightened by all of the lines of code you will just need to press this download raw file button once downloaded you have this GSX file which we will need to install inside of After Effects which is also really simple to do this just go to file open the scripts panel and click on install script file now click on the downloaded script and restart After Effects once we started in the scripts panel you can see that there is a new option available the export composition data to Json script this is the option which we are going to press to export the tracking data from After Effects into a file that planner can read and open up once pressed just change the export location and click on export to make it so the blender can read this Json file we will need to download one more file from the same GitHub page which I've also linked below again just press download the raw file now let's open up blender and once blender is open let's go to edit preferences and search for the add-ons panel inside this panel let's click on install and then search and click for the python file that we just downloaded once installed you can go to file and under the import panel there should be a new Option called the after effects compensation data converted dot Json let's click on this new Option and open up the Json file that we just exported from After Effects once imported you will see a few new objects let's first scale up our camera so that we can see it because it's really tiny for some reason once you have done that you can also delete the background footage plane which is also imported from After Effects now let's click on our camera and inside the camera options panel let's enable background images click on ADD image and make sure that the background source is set to movie clip and then open the background footage which you tracked inside of After Effects you don't have to do this but as you can see if you would now go into the camera view you can see the same background footage and this is really nice for compositing and seeing directly how things look but if we would now play the scene you can see that for some reason our track isn't perfect anymore and this is because blender starts at frame 1 and after effects starts at frame 0. so therefore we will need to shift the keyframes of the camera by one frame now we can go crazy and place different objects on the tracking plane but don't actually delete the tracking plane itself because we're going to make a Shadow catcher out of it to do this we will need to make sure that we are in the Cycles Render engine and then search for shadow catcher and turn this option off if we would now add in a light source and go into the rendered view you can see that the plane doesn't render itself but it only renders the shadows of other objects let's also make sure that the background is transparent so that even in a rendered view we can still see our background footage I hope that this video was helpful to someone if you still have any questions feel free to place them in the comments below and I will try to answer every single one good luck with your motion tracking and bye

Channel: Twan Oligschlaeger

Views: 78,068

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender beginner, beginner, beginner tutorial, tutorial, easy blender, easy blender tutorial, motiontrack, motion track, motiontracking, motion tracking, video tracking, tracking, blender motion tracking, blender tracking, 3d tracking, after effects, after effects motion tracking

Id: BlkJ_WWdtkQ

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 25 2023