Learn Camera Tracking in 6 Minutes!

hey everyone ken improv here in this video we're going to tackle camera tracking in blender and we're going to do it in six minutes so after this you should be able to master the basics of camera tracking in blender i actually made a video just like this several years ago got some great feedback but then right after that blender's ui changed completely and you guys have been asking me ever since to update this video so that's what i'm doing for you right now so thank you for commenting i really do read them i really do listen and thank you to potatoes and trucks for asking if i'm dead um i'm not dead all right let's start the tutorial with step one loading your footage so i'm going to actually use a new vfx tab and just drop in my image sequence i have it all converted to jpegs an mov file will be just fine if you want to use that i'm going to prefetch my footage and then jump into step two detect features to track this is kind of an automatic way of tracking i'm going to come over here to the left hand side and detect features we get this little detect features menu i'm going to increase the margin which is the space in my footage around the edge just to give us some a little more wiggle room turn the threshold down and cut the distance in half and you see we get way more trackers and by doing that pressing ctrl t we can track forward a bunch of them are going to be trash so step three let's clean up the bad tracks i'm going to come down here to solve and choose the cleanup menu set the error to something like .125 or something around that area for the error level of track you want to get rid of select delete tracks and then just start sliding the amount of frames that have a track with that error you can also use this menu after you press press clean tracks and it'll start deleting and removing the bad tracks nice and clean and shiny with that done it's time to repeat steps two and three only backwards i know i don't mean face to wall while you do it i mean go to the end of your timeline and do it but first press ctrl l to lock all those clean tracks that you have at the end of your timeline do the same thing backwards detect features only this time press ctrl shift and t so that the tracker tracks automatically backwards in blender and now you have twice as many markings and you can go through the clean process sometimes you don't get anything different here but sometimes you get a few good tracks out of that then you can proceed to manual tracking if the detect features didn't work and you don't have enough tracks in there just select a point of high contrast you can lock your footage to that track so that you can view it you can see what locking your footage does it allows you to view that track throughout the duration of the clip to make sure it stays on point to that location you can do this repeat this as many times as necessary if you want to manually track your footage also if we examine the graph here you can see you can actually just click on a straggler marker here and you can see this one jumps around a good bit using this eyedropper tool you can see as well just different ways to visualize what tracks are are bad so we want to go through and any track that its graph isn't really following the status quo of all the others you can just kind of visualize them using that graph and just remove the stragglers this will help clean up any bad tracks that the cleanup process missed and give you a nice clean even track throughout your whole footage all right it's also important to know if a track goes off footage because of the footage just simply not revealing that point of high contrast anymore you can just simply clear the remainder of that track and then lock it and that way that data will no longer be taken into consideration when you go to solve this isn't a must do step but it is something that if you're having trouble getting a clean solve you may want to clean up tracks like that just clear the remainder where the track isn't actually useful on screen and it won't be taken into consideration step five solve your camera motion before we solve i come down here to the camera settings and punch in my camera sensor width i just googled that for my particular camera i also am going to put the focal length in there under lens with that done click solve camera i got a solve error of 1.18 which isn't that bad but ideally i'd want it to be under one so i'm going to play with the lens size and solve again and there with a wider lens angle i get a much better solve step 6 is set up your 3d scene come down here to scene setup click set as background and set up tracking scene you'll notice we have a plane with the box and it also sets our render layers in the background now you'll need to select three tracks for the floor of your 3d scene and then a track for the orientation as well you can play around with this until that plane and box are sitting right on top of your footage in a way that matches your ground now looking through the camera in a new layout tab we can just rotate the camera and move it around until that plane matches even closer to the ground in our footage this can take some time and it can be kind of finicky but i'm just using r to rotate and g to grab to move my camera around so that everything sort of lines up with the ground in my footage you want to make sure you play through and you can now see everything is tracked you good tracker blender person you voila you're done and that'll lead you to step 7 which is render your scene you want to make sure transparent under film is checked you also want to make sure you're using cycles because ev won't quite work with the shadow layer just yet and then if you jump into the compositor you can see blender if you use the setup tracking scene already will put all the render layers in the correct spot so that you have a 3d asset and it'll automatically composite it over top of your footage with a shadow layer all nice and neat now you have the flexibility of swapping out whatever 3d assets you want into your camera tracked scene such as this car which you can download from my website motionblindstudio.com you like that plug you can download this model play around with it it's fully rigged and you can throw it in there and make some sort of cool animation and fool all your friends into thinking you just bought a sports car so that's it for this video guys thanks so much for watching that is the basics of camera tracking and how to master camera tracking in blender very very quickly but using these steps you should be able to fine-tune your footage and your track and move on to bigger and brighter visual effects thanks for watching everyone i'll see you next time

Channel: Kenan Proffitt

Views: 15,115

Rating: 4.9542856 out of 5

Keywords: b3d, blender, vfx, blender3d, motionblend

Id: c40GiUTHH30

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021