Manual Object Tracking In Maya Tutorial - Part 1

hi and welcome to vfx tutors i'm josh and in this tutorial we're going to be continuing with this sword object tracked and our purge guy shot so in the previous tutorials in the photography ones we've created the sword prop and then we've sort of ingested some footage and done a single frame lineup in 3d so now we're ready to do our manual object track so i've got my my file of my sword so i'm just going to work in there and we've got our prop sword the one that we built on the previous one and we've got our mesh we can probably delete this now we don't really need this and the position ref so we've just got our sword so what we want to do first is because we want to animate the sword because we can do this all manually in maya so it's going to be mostly just animating our sword very similar to the road animation tutorials but we don't really want to be animating really on just a group you can there's no problem with it but it kind of can be a bit messy if we um need to change anything or don't think with it it's always better to sort of animate on controls or locators or something like that so what we can do is just let's create a basic curve and i'm just going to scale this up and i'm going to go to my top down menu but we're not doing anything complicated here we're just effectively making an object that we can put our sword under so if we do add stuff to it we can drop it under this curve so let's try and get that as chris i can just snap it in that axis okay panels perspective and maybe i'm gonna snap it up to the middle of this sort of the metal part of the hilt and you can you can pretty much do anything you want to this you can make it oval shaped something i'm just going to leave it like a circle it's just like so i can easily select and i'm just going to call this sword let's go ctrl ctrl then what i need to make sure is i freeze in fact actually before i do anything i just realized it's actually upside so we're actually that way the sword is actually uh it doesn't probably matter too much to be honest but for the sake of it let's actually put it the right way up and let's freeze the transformations on that so now it sorts the right way up in the scene it's just like sort of scene etiquette you could have left it as it was but it's nicer to sort of have it the right way up so you always know the orientation and we pretty much don't need to change anything else so what we can do is just freeze our transformations on our sword control and you get selector group and just middle mouse click it under and it's as simple as that so now all our animation will be done on this control like so you can do it on a group or anything like that but it's just kind of nice to make a small little controller for it so uh it's just easier to animate so it's gonna be nothing complicated that's pretty much it so now we've done our single frame lineup and all the other bits so let's import in our geometry our camera and our geometry and our sword lineup just gonna go file import it's actually in our props there let's get match move and go to the files that you've previously exported tutorial so i'm going to import the single frame lineup so now we have a scene here and what i will do is just import the set geo yeah that one got the room set here so now we're in our room and what we can do now we go file import because the last thing we did we did a quick single frame lineup of the sword so it would just help us because sometimes it's easier to line ups single frame lineups or objects in 3d even though we like you're more than welcome to try and track this in 3d but i can guarantee you're going to get like jittery problems and it popping in and out of depth and to be honest whenever you like sort of work a company and you're given an object track 99 of it it's probably going to be like this you're going to be object tracking stuff mostly like with swords they're not going to be like i see a lot of tutorials on this and you you notice that all these balls yeah it makes it really easy to track but this this then this is never going to happen ever like i've worked on countless marvel and disney films and you will never see props with that sort of tracking markers all those golf balls or tennis ping pong balls because it distracts from the actions and the actors so they will make the props as real as possible they're not going to make it for you easy to track basically so like there are very few object tracks that i've come across where you don't have to just do it like this so this is probably the way you're gonna end up doing it most of the time anyway so yeah and it's just gonna teach you it's gonna give you the better skills to do object tracks and stuff instead of doing tracking stuff which is never going to happen cool so so we've got our scene and we've got our sword that we exported out from 3d and we can like tidy this up a bit it's ctrl g there and we'll just call this set geo just put glp for group under it we can drag and drop this under the scene and control g and we'll just call this sword so now we've just got a nice really tidy scene we've just got our match move scene and our sword animation that we're gonna sort of use so let's go to our panels perspective and you see we've got two cameras in here so if we open it up we can we don't need this we can delete that and we go to our camera we'll look through let's check what's our timeline at one let's make sure our timeline's matching and now you should see with our camera selected that we have our keys there and that's keys on it it's a it's a solid non-moving camera so yeah we don't really need to do anything that all we need to do is we can select everything apart from the visibility because we might want to hide it sometimes right click and lock so now we can't break this or mess it up it's it's locked in that's place forever we'll just select our camera go to our tribute editor and we need to change our image plane because at the moment we've got not that you can see it but if we show polygons we've got our original uh image sequence on there so we need to replace this with our undistorted plate so we have our understood plate here and you can see it's a little bit downrest because we've done it at half rest but it should be fine which is our image sequence let's change our alpha gain to 0.7 and our depth to one and sharp polygons again so it's entirely so let's actually just get this up to our lineup so we did our we export our sword earth i think uh files 1104 and you see it's lining up pretty well so let me just select our camera again go to our image plane and you can change your alpha game to pretty much whatever's comfortable for you to track in so see everything sort of disappears after a while but let's bring it down so we can see that a lot clearer and let's change our color space to asus cg because then see how what the colors now we've got the true colors because we ex we transcoded our footage to ace cg so you can see the difference here so it is coming at raw um chances are you might accidentally be an srgb where it's going to show very dark because it's linearized so to show the true color space it's an ace of cg and if we just let's just hide our set geo you can see now we've got the true colors which makes it a lot easier for us to do look dev and all that sort of so we can see exactly what's going on cool so so yeah let's uh move on with this so we've imported everything everything's pretty much ready to go and say if you didn't do this let's let's just go through this sort of the reason why i exported this out from 3ds because it's just really quick and easy to line up so if i just tear off a copy let's turn my uh poly cam off because i don't really need that so the reason why i did this is because it's super easy to then just line up with that geo but you may not have done that so we'll just do a quick quick line up of just say if you didn't have that so even though we do have this it's probably best i'll show you how i'd do it if i didn't have it because we know this is all at the correct sort of scale we can sort of the first thing that i'll always do is try and roughly even though this is completely out of depth i'm just going to roughly match this angle it doesn't have to be perfect because we can sort of refine it so now you can sort let's also hide our set geo so we're always selecting the sword control and you can see make sure that your axis orientation is on object not world otherwise you're going to get funny orientations so always make sure an object so all i've done is roughly sort of get this in the right angle what i'm going to do is just push it forward in depth let's start adjusting it roughly to line up here with just using the the axis then luckily for like something like this is a it's a static solid object so it's they're usually pretty easy to sort of get your rough lineups so i'm just going to zoom in and i'm going to focus on this sort of handle side if i'm i'm just using my 2d pan and zoom as you can see here if you press backslash it enables it so to do that you need to press backslash to enable 2d pan zoom then hold backslash to right click to zoom in and out and middle mouse button to translate around so i'm just going to get this see how this sort of hilt i don't think it's here where it's called something else but this sort of metal protect a bit here i'm gonna roughly get that even all the way around so it's still too small so i'm just gonna push it more in depth and i'm gonna now focus on getting this the right size and whilst focusing on this i can also see my handle sort of off and remember that this bent quite a bit so it's kind of like a it's not a very strong prop it does wobble around a little bit all i'm doing is just doing very small movements i'm just going to do fine small very small movements basically and if you've done any of the rotomotion tutorials um we're basically going to do like our keyframes and you can see like that's only taken i've just roughly lined it up at the beginning and pushed it in the depth and you can see that we've got a pretty good lineup already it doesn't take it's it's not a huge task to do without 3d if we unhide our sword lineup we can see how close we were and it's a little bit it's dependent let's see which ones so that's about the same let's hide our sword look but as long as you got it in the correct depth they probably will be slightly different but all that matters is that you get it as accurate as possible but that's how you do it in maya and the fact that they're slightly off is is it's not a massive thing in fact if i just hide that one and have a look at this one it kind of looks a little bit i don't know if i rushed it but one actually we've just done now in my actually looks it looks much better see we've got all that it's really close all the way up to the edge actually the handle is actually fitting quite well there so maybe it's just been on if we just round that off it's still slightly off but let's not worry about the handle because we're not going to be replacing the handle the only thing that we're going to be doing is just improving the sword so that's completely down to whatever you want to do obviously when you look at this if you replace you you kind of wanna the plan is to replace it with something a little bit bigger so we don't have to paint anything out of the clothing we can just we can just render over the top of the sword and roto out the guy so it's not a super complicated thing so we'll probably after we've tracked it we'll concept some sword ideas then we'll go through sort of making the sword but um the easiest thing for us to do is sort of build our concept around this sword but make it bigger so we don't have to paint any of it out because it's quite a lot it's quite a big frame range i'm not sure if we'll do the whole range but we can sure give it a go anyway so we've got our first lineup so if we go to our channel box editor i say you don't well because i'm using maya you actually have to use my you can do this in any 3d software um if you use blender 3ds max or god i can't think what this there's there's loads but that seems to be the most common even houdini i guess you can do this in houdini and stuff just i'm just using my because this is just what we use at work so most most vfx places use meyer um but there are like tons of other good software out there to use so i'm pretty happy with that lineup so if i go to my channel box layer editor i can see i've got my translation rotations so i need to make sure that these are keyed so if i press s that keys everything or you can just select all your translations and rotations and key selected because we've kind of when you press select on control when you press s it just puts a key on everything so that's including the scale and visibility so we can actually lock the scale because we don't ever want to change the scale depending on how good of sort of sword is but hopefully it should be pretty much perfect so now we've keyed that on that position what we can do we can look through if we go back to our 2d pan if we look how much we've actually got a lot of frames here and um what i'm gonna do i'm going to i'm gonna i'm gonna track all the way back to because i don't wanna this could turn into an absolutely massively long tutorial so i'm just undecided whether to do 200 frames or too short but anyway let's figure that out let's just get going um i'll see how long this takes um because after a while it's it'll be the sort of same thing over and over so but if you've done any of the rotomation ones it's going to be pretty much exactly the same we're going to start so i'm just blabbering on now sorry so we've hidden all the geometry and we just start doing our our key poses same thing as we did on the roto adam i'm just going to go i am going to go to so i'm just going to look through and just sort of analyze it's very good to look at your footage because it kind of also gives you an idea of how many key poses you want to do so when we're done sort of uh looking at this animation here if we can looking at the sword we can sort of see the movement's not really that bad there's no rotations it's just more moving up and down it's more when we get to this part here where i'm spinning it around and rotating it we're going to need a lot of key poses because it's probably going to go it's probably going to go a little bit funny and do some flips and stuff and probably here it's not so bad here we'll probably have to do quite a few key poses and this bit here will be so fast we probably won't even know what's going on because sometimes like that's just blur and we'll all you can do all you can do is do your best and try and get it keep it as logical as po possible it's like if if i had a decent rig i would probably also do a lineup of um uh the character and place the sword in his hand so i can get the sort of position nice and the range of movement sort of more accurate but for this i'm not gonna worry too much so you can see these sort of movements we're gonna need more we're going to need more key poses but i'm going to actually work for the start because they're more complex well not complex it's just a little bit more you'll have to more keyframes so i'm going to work my way backwards through the simplest section so now i'm gonna go got my start frame and i'm gonna do it every 10 frames for now so my next one is 1100 so using my 2d pan uh 2d pan i'm just going to press backslash and hold it and zoom in and i'm going to try and not change the depth so much i'm going to try and get everything with just the x and y so before i do that you have a choice whether if you want to key it pressing s every time or keying up here or you can turn on auto key here that should be highlighted in red now so that means every movement you do now it's going to create a keyframe so this is good if you just forget to do it and you like i prefer working an auto key but some people don't like it um because if you don't forget to turn it off you're going to be keying everything so just make sure you once you're done just make sure you turn off so i'm just going to go through the exact same process you got to focus on getting this handling luckily you can sort of see the shape of the hill which is kind of a a squirkle i guess like a round browned rectangle and we'll get that lined up and just zoom out and try and get this as best as possible so the tighter we do get this obviously because we're keeping we're keeping this part we're probably just going to enhance this bit so we want to make sure it's solid to here but we also want to make sure that we are getting the best lineup for every single keyframe because that means that we're going to cover up a lot of this because i don't really want to do any extensive paint work on this i just want to cover up the old sword with our new one so now if i press greater than and lower then on my keyboard i can skip through the keyframes and i can just check that it's looking okay we haven't done a huge range of movement sort of check this on the wire frame as well and we sort of see these two little black dots here they seem to be working really well and even though this blur is sort of we may not get a perfect line up on all of this but as long as it's consistent throughout so let's make sure because it can be quite tricky because even though it's just a basic sword it can be very easy to get thrown off by small bits but but this is probably how you end up getting object tracks in there whilst you're working at a company and hopefully this shows you enough sort of skills to go straight into a job of doing stuff like that so i'm just going on some 1090 i'm just going to do the exact same thing i don't really want to change i want to try and keep moving the depth as minimal as possible because that's where we start getting funny things happening but we will have to do it at some point when things just aren't fitting so i'm just looking at my hilt looking where the handle is and i know that it's sort of bent so this may the handle and the sword might actually fit at some point but i'm not relying on it my main focus is getting this section and the tip of the sword quite tight so i'm actually gonna change the depth slightly because i think it's a little bit too big and if you get your because at the moment we're doing key poses and if you get your key poses really tight it's hard it's it's literally half the battle and if you're getting real nice usually your in-betweens will be pretty good i'm just using my plus and minus to sort of raise the size of the the sort of gizmo i'm not sure if it actually helps but it i i feel it does sometimes i feel it gives me more leverage and i can move things a little bit smaller in smaller amounts sorry so see this is coming off here want to make sure this is pretty good throughout so if we use our greater than buttons see it helps you a little bit more rotation so this is matching it's always gonna be quite tricky with the blur but like i said you can with the blurry stuff you can only do your best and obviously it's not gonna fit absolutely perfectly around this blur so we actually but we can get it fitting perfectly around this sort of very in focus stuff so we can see everything's working really nice let's just see what that tween's like and you see actually the movement's actually not too bad it's very small slippings where we haven't keyed it but we're going to worry about that in um tutorial after this once we've done our sort of our main key poses cool so i'm just going to go through every 10 frames and do the same thing so this could be it might be repetitive but it's kind of i don't mind object tracking it's quite nice it's a bit enjoyable especially if you've got a nice model to work with and uh everything works sometimes you may not have the luxury that's one thing that you might not have the luxury of is having a model that works which it can be a bit of a pain because obviously it's not going to line up as much as you want it to it's also another thing to sort of keep an eye out for us obviously we can sort of see at the moment the character's arm is pointing all the way out so there's probably very minimal depth movement up until there and there so it's always good to keep an eye out on like the bending of the arms as well because i can kind of help you figure out where stuff is i think for now it's it's going to be a range of extremely small shifts and depth cool so for every single one i'm just going to sort of check it see if there's not anything wildly going wrong and whenever you can you kind of want to get if you've got a lot of blur you want to get it in the middle of the blur because when it when you do the rendering and stuff obviously you're not gonna have the exact same blur but if you get it keep it in the middle it will blend really nicely once we just have a look how that's between you so it's coming off quite a bit there but that's expected because we're only doing the key poses so you go to 1070. this is where it starts to come down a little bit more out of depth pull it down all i'm doing is just doing very rough positioning first and i'll just go into the tighter lineups luckily we can see where these bolts are so that helps tremendously so there's plenty of stuff on here that we can see so if you just pull it off to the side and see everything's way too big our blades way off there so we need to go back in depth to make it smaller to fit let's just rotate this round match up with those bolts sometimes if you just hide it just to see see we're still way too big i think or we need to rotate more so let's push it back and i do see sometimes i use the the camera view quite a lot but you also want to check in your perspective that you're not doing anything wildly crazy let's try and get that lined up you can sort of see the shape here let's just check out blades sort of fitting cause luckily the bolts are gonna be quite handy because we've got a nice line of them maybe even still bit too too big let's get these bolts because you've got plenty of things for reference for the sort of positions that's where it starts to get tricky that's why we kind of did this bit first hard to see sometimes but you can see we're getting these bits lining up quite nicely now cool so those bolts uh looking pretty good let's see bring it back a tiny bit more let's look at our blade the blade looks pretty good as well we can sort of see the tip of our sword and we know that it's sort of there's a slight amount of bending in there but like i said our main focus is to get this this bit working pretty perfectly because it's the attachment that really matters because obviously this we're gonna render over the top of this sword and hopefully we won't have to paint anything out so it's always good to check in your perspective as well same with rotamation we've not moved a huge amount but it looks like a fairly logical movement you can see that it's kind of come off there where we'll have to put some more tweens in but let's not worry about that too much so let's go down to 1060. so let's get that sort of angle and then just from looking at the arm animation we see he's bringing his arm down and bringing it closer so that it's obviously going to go down the more like sort of logical movements we can place in there before we start lining up the easier will become so we've just pushed it down and brought it back a little bit and now we can just see how well that lines up sometimes it's quite hard to see rotated [Music] round see we're still quite big here around the edge so let's bring it back down a lot of times it's just a lot of very tiny movements i actually think this needs to rotate because our handle is sort of going this way and it is a lot of fiddling but the more accurate you get this the the better it will be let's actually turn on the texturing off actually see better with it on because we can actually use some of these textures to help with our lineups as well so we've clearly got if we look at this sort of handle shape because it's very rotated round was ours is quite off so maybe we've gone too far if we just look at the size of those loops on there we see we're still quite big so let's push it back even further so when doing stuff like this obviously the hardest thing to do is gauging the correct depth which is saying that you'll learn in time this will be the difference between getting things lined up nicely and it can be quite tricky to do sometimes but with more practice so you should be go up to this quite easily so i think our bolts are lined up nicely maybe two up and go up just ever so slightly you see this this actual front line up took a little bit longer than the others but i always like to spend more time on the more complex it's moving down in fact if we get our render we can make this let's go to our anti-aliasing oh it's on let's bring that down so it's not so heavy of course if you zoom out and these are greater than keys you can see we get something really good here and like i said we're just gonna go keep going through and we still see a rough animation there let's say we're gonna need more tweens for the the larger range of movements so let's now go down to here and the same as before it's going to try and match i'm going to use this reference to match the sort of position i'm just gonna slide it in push it in depth until it roughly fits and when it's got a rough fit we can tighten that line up i'm just doing very small movements pushing it in and out of depth let's just hide hide and unhide it can be quite difficult to see when it's like this sometimes i think we're still tiny bit too big because we can see this edge here and we can see that the sort of hilt i'm just going to do very small adjustments pushing it back in depth hide that just check the line up maybe a tiny bit too big still so we see these sort of loop bits here matching up and just about see the corner maybe we still need to go back a tiny bit more maybe so if you just have a look at our frames so we have a look at this sword from the side you can see if we sort of look at this and look at that sort of movement it's bringing it down rotating around and the sword is by the side so it starts it's looking fairly logical so let's just check that line up obviously this this is fairly rough this handle and obviously the thumb is probably covering some of it so let's just slide for our timeline see what we got so it's looking pretty good so that's how good so i'll frame 40 and if we just look it's not a ton of movement between that so it's probably slightly going back and a little rotation so that's as usual let's zoom in using our 2d pan let's try and match the sort of position the rotation of it then we can see that we've got to push it back quite quite a bit well not a huge bit just uh enough to shrink it down we can see that our bolts are sort of fitting quite nicely and like let's see you're more than welcome to try and track this in 3d um from experience i just say there's no point i wouldn't bother um this is probably quicker and gives you less problems but you're more than welcome to try but this is pretty much the way you'll end up doing it i'd expect i say you're never gonna get you're never gonna get ping pong balls or mark but he might get someone that puts a little bit of green tape on there but nothing that's going to be really anything that's trackable apart from doing it this way so this is only just going to help you sort of get the correct skills i would hope and i guess it sort of teaches some basic animation because we are just effectively just animating this so it's um yeah if you're into animating you probably would love this it's a good way to get a good animated reference as well so as it gets further away into the darkness gets a little bit more difficult but we're making some good ground so let's go to obviously these last bits are going to be the easiest because there's barely any movement so let's go to frame 1020. can't we see what the position is so let's just line that up just using the h button to hide and unhide so i can just see what it looks like and if you're having trouble with the brightness of this if you select our camera we should be able to bring up the gain unless it's not maxed out that's already maxed out we can't change that okay so just don't worry about make sure you don't change the pivot point of course let's go back just check our frames let's see you can see it's like quite off there it's not a sword is bent but it's not that bent so this even though we're not relying on the entire sword because it's wobbly we still want to use it for some sort of reference you may even find going back through keyframes you might want to change some of your poses let's go to our 1010 it's getting a bit further away and a bit more blurry let's get increasingly harder to see but you can just about make out details um i feel like we might be pushing it a little bit too far in depth so i think one of our frames here i think what 1040 is off because we may have missed the handle because i just noticed that just notice the frame so it's looking a little bit funny but just notice the handles sort of like coming up here so it's always good to just double check everything and i can see that the movement's a little bit nicer so it looked a bit jumpy i was just wondering why it turns out i was just may have missed the handle so it's good to keep in keep that source with that in sort of position as well it does look like that's jumping in depth quite a bit so i'll start to look a little bit more of a natural movement now it's not jumping from my arm but previously it looks like it was traveling further than my arm so let's just go back and refine that position and as you see it's looking much more natural i think we can see the tip of the sword there so that's probably to get in there as well i'm just making sure everything's lining up nicely so let's just go to off pass frame well first frame okay so look at that rough position you can see that our handles there and just lined up as tight as possible so it's pretty good if we just screw up for our title scrub for our timeline we can see we've got a pretty wobbly track bar keyframes are looking pretty good so what we'll do is start going from the other way so before you don't think make sure you save this and then just go file scene save as so you don't lose any of your stuff it's cool so now let's go we've done our key from keyframes here so now let's go through the other way because now we've got way more movement so it's going to be a little bit more tricky so we might need more key poses but let's uh carry on doing it ten frames at a time just so it's not turning into worker because these these tutorials will probably take quite a long time because it's a lot of manual stuff but also a lot of attention to detail so let's just zoom in let's just try and get that lined up there obviously we're losing the tip of the sword there so now that's where it starts to become a little bit more difficult where we can't see all of the sword but we still got the handle and all the bolts you see the edge of the blade here so we need to rotate that around quite a bit so when you come at angles and it can be quite difficult to see go to our perspective view you know bring this down back a tiny bit still need to rotate it a bit i'm going to try to get this lined up as best as possible so it's kind of looking all right there and we can see our sort of tween is way off but we're only doing our key poses this is gonna be a bit they're gonna look a bit worse on this whereas faster movements so we're just gonna do the same thing go through all those the main keyframe lineups so while still looking at how the range of movement that the character is kind of doing the depth isn't doesn't seem to be changing too much it's just mostly within a couple centimeters in front of him so hoping we should be able to get a lot of these lineups fairly easy without having to adjust the depth too much because that's where it starts to become tricky sometimes you just can't see so just pull it away so you always want to try and keep everything in the center of the blur and if we look at our i can't see this box so that looks like so we can become quite tricky to find the position luckily we can sort of we've got lots of shapes here to sort of giving it away these bolts are probably the bolts handle in the hill are going to be most useful to us a little bit too close even though it's wobbly that sort of tips should line up this should give us a good idea of the depth do it's looking pretty good so at the moment i'm just looking at these bolts trying to get them all look fairly good then i can see the tip of this so it actually needs to rotate a little bit more but it's hard to tell if it's the sword that's wobbling or not you have to kind of have to take best best judgment with the sword because it does it does flex and wobble so so in between those two keyframes we've got quite a big movement so we can sort of see that the tween is it's quite rough but we can get that on the second pass so these bigger movements it's going to look a bit a bit nastier in the middle you can compare to these where it's a bit bit nicer just floaty but these ones will need more tweens so i'm just going to carry on see not even with this there's no way that's going to figure out the correct movement between this frame and that frame so it's just this is too much movement all we can do is just try and get the best lineup because even when we do our refinement afterwards we'll probably still have to adjust these key these frames so i'm just going to get a rough line up first i'm just going to bring it up and you can see why this this is if you have a model that you've already made and it's gone you've built it from accurate geometry this is so much easier because if you don't have that and you have to do it with geometry that someone's randomly built and it's kind of not accurate it makes things a lot more difficult this is why as well always would advise working with scans and set geo and really preparing all your stuff because it just makes your life so much easier you've already got this sort of stuff's already a quite a tricky job to do there's not really many people that can do or want to do it so you need as many things as possible to make it easier for you and having accurate geometry is is the key to most of your pain because if this wasn't accurate and it was just randomly made and by some modeler and didn't pay attention to any of the sort of sizes of it this wouldn't fit in all the angles it might fit in the one frame that they modeled it from but that's not what we want we want it to fit on every single frame which this this model does and i'm sure if you've tried object tracking manually before or just any object tracking before you've tried it with some sort of rough geometry that may have been roughly made or something it it's very tricky if you haven't got the right model and you can see now that all of this is just lining up perfectly which means a much nicer much nicer track for you um this still teaches you all the same stuff and uh yeah i hope uh hope you guys enjoy it it's probably gonna be a very long tutorial tutorial series just for this sort of shot but um i'm trying to squeeze in as much as i can with work as well so sorry if i haven't been posting as much as i have done before but hopefully we have some more interlinked stuff so i'm quite happy with that sort of lineup for zoom out you can see most of us that's working pretty nicely so if we actually go through that you can see it's actually not done a bad job to be honest it's kind of roughly figured out obviously we need to refine it so let's go to 1140 and we can just look i'm gonna d i usually i just did the same thing over and over get my first initial line up sort of get this matching i'll just drag it across just try and mimic the movement as much as possible um we've got plenty of stuff to sort of use as line up reference push this forward something like the hilt is a little bit small zoom out just so obviously i've probably said this like quite a few times already but the sword is flexing so it may not fit perfectly in every single position but i'd probably say that is is probably extremely close so but i'm still going to always prioritize this end the bolts and stuff sort of see that needs to come back too big just gets it can be quite difficult to see where all the bits are you can just about see where the bolts are here probably about right there let me just push it a tiny bit back trying to get all this matching nicely and evenly so those are lining up pretty well there's a tiny rotation up if we zoom out and skip between our keyframes have a look at our perspective just here and yeah it looks fairly logical it's doing the move let's see how on the tweens worked it's obviously missed out all the final bits but just don't worry about that let's go to this frame 1150 so this is like almost right in front of our faces of course uh this is a sort of just in time for halloween as well if you like a flight halloween it wasn't planned but um if you want to do some halloween vfx you now have this purge guy we'll try and hopefully i'll have time to do the background on all the roto stuff as well all the keying maybe try a bit of both at the moment i'm just going to focus on getting the sword so i find a lot of the sometimes people get stuck on object tracking stuff because it's not some people expect it just to track it in in 3d or whatever tracking software they got on they should get a perfect one but it's hardly ever like that this is this is probably this is what usually happens this is why stuff isn't probably going to be automated as well because i'm not sure how they would even possibly think about making software to do this that's why they'd always be matched movers i think which there seems to be a lot of people asking the future of match move so if you can get a computer to do all this yeah i'm sure i'm sure that won't be long but it's very unlikely you'll be able to get a computer or ai to sort of do stuff like this so i wouldn't worry too much so we're just going to go through all these keyframes and get them really nice lineups a little bit close so if things just aren't fitting like you should be able to get it pretty perfect like you shouldn't have things that are wildly off you shouldn't be uh going oh why is this like crazy off these should be pretty close another bolts in these holes cool so it's only a tiny movement so if we look at our tween it's not so bad because i said at the beginning we probably wouldn't do the whole thing because it's a lot um we'll try and do it because at the end of the day we're probably gonna have to keyframe every single key on this so it's probably gonna take quite a while but it'll be worth it most stuff you're doing like this it's gonna have to be tracked every keyframe anyway so it's kind of unavoidable it saves you a lot of time messing around as well so you don't you can just skip the sort of can i do it in 3d or just go straight to this personally i prefer doing it this way is much nicer it's a little bit more enjoyable doing object tracks this way because you don't have to do loads of 2d tracking then you don't have to fix it because you'll get loads of depth pops and stuff like that it's um yeah you can filter it out and stuff like that and smooth out but this is much more enjoyable i think and if it's enjoyable it becomes easier so it's pretty close so we're coming close to the end 1080 1180 sorry yeah that's actually it's in these single frames it's a lot easier actually because he's just waving it around in front of him and when we do like um we'll do some salt concepts as well so you don't have to do mine you can do any source orders have some fun with it i'm undecided whether to do sort of realistic we'll just do something wacky be funny to see him with a giant final fantasy sword or something so this is where it starts to get a little bit trickier because there's a far a lot of fast big movements but i'm just going to do the exact same as before so between those frames it's gone a long way so we're definitely gonna need more between so i'm just matching the sort of rotation and angle i'm just gonna use my translations and just pull it in i'm just going to keep doing that so i'm matching the length see the faster the movement it gets a little bit more difficult because we can't really tell can't really see much detail but what we can do is we can actually see some detail so if we hold it we can still see our bolts and stuff and this sort of edge here so just by looking at that i can see that we're actually more tilted that way and rotate it around like this let's bring it up so we're in a quite fast movement so we're definitely going to get some wobble or something here so the best thing we can do is just try and make it as nice as possible because you're never going to get it well you should be able to get it pretty close just a very small adjustments to get the sword the right size it feels actually a little bit more rotated that way bring it up it's a very angry purge guy give it a sword i guess you could even use it as an element as well just to stick an element off someone's back of someone's head in there and have them chop it off but um for now we'll just keep it basic as a replacement cool so if we just look at that we can see there's a ton of movement there so it's not going to quite get it it's got the rotations fairly alright it's just the position so let's go to 1200 so i'm actually unsure if doing one on 1200 is worth it but because that just kind of lies on a keyframe that we may want to leave as a tween these are all not great keyframes to do lineups on so let's do one on 195. so let's do it on the fifth frame because that there's no way i can distinguish what's great there i have to sort of probably do one on 195 and probably on one on last frame where i can see it the clearest just so i'm not adding any sort these these sort of key poses to add in our most accurate sort of positions and i can't i can't distinguish where that is really unless i have a body in there as well but um it's a place in his hand that's that's why sometimes it's better to have a uh a rig and have him holding on the hands but for this case i don't have that and sometimes you just won't have that anyway let's see the hilts up here it's a little bit rotated around like that i think we may have got too far back in depth see our hilt here and we kind of need to bring it up like this because i'll see our rotation kind of feels off feels a bit more like that so it's always looking at these sort of lines getting the the bests off because we can see this line here the edge of this sort of bracket here and the bolts and detailing on the sword so we might just have pulled it too far back in depth so it's just a load of fine tuning you can see that's fitting nicely so if we skip between our keyframes we can see we've got something all right there but we we can do a tween there maybe but i'm kind of wanting to i'm probably gonna end up doing almost this manual keyframe anyway so let's just go to frame 2012. let's get that rough line up let's drag it across because we can actually see some stuff on this frame and hopefully the tween should help us so this has moved you can see my arms the arm is stretched all the way out so we've moved quite forward in depth swung around quite a bit so hopefully if we get a really decent lineup see it becomes very difficult to distinguish what's what i think we can almost see where the bolts are so see a glint of the bolt here and if we just go back we can see we've got a massive movement here between such a short keyframes so if we just it's never going to really tween that well but it's actually got some of the movement quite nicely so what we can do is maybe do a tween a single frame maybe on which one maybe uh 1199 let's try that so let's bring that in just lighten it up obviously this is going to come forward quite a bit do so let's just check that tween key post sorry it does seem to have helped we still have to refine it like a lot of feeling we're probably gonna have to do this frame by frame well we will definitely have to do it frame by frame but uh go for it sequentially but it's kind of working here on the in-betweens if it's working like now it's just putting that keyframes helped quite a bit you see how that's kind of following it now just that bit but yeah so we've sort of done our single single frames so if we go through them all we can see we've got a nice blocked out animation you want to spend time getting these lineups really nice because it just means it's less will be less work for you in the long run but i think with this we're probably gonna have to sort of manually track quite a lot of it anyway so that's a lot of keyframes um but it should be cool once we're done so we're done with this first half just doing the key poses um so yeah if you've um enjoyed this tutorial hit that like button and subscribe for more like this you

Channel: VFX Tutors

Views: 2,834

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Manual Object Tracking In Maya, Object tracking tutorial, Object tracking 3dequalizer tutorial, object tracking tutorial, how to object track, object track in PF track, object track in 3de, Advanced Object tracking, How to object track a Prop, tracking a prop, manual object track, maya animation, Animation in maya tutorial, Object track by hand, How to object track in maya, beginners object track tutorial, best object track tutorial, matchmove, matchmove reel, track by hand

Id: 0aswG4mmdeE

Length: 85min 1sec (5101 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020