Super Easy Nuke Camera Tracking Tutorial

[Music] today we're going to learn how to motion track inside of nuke for the absolute beginner if you like this style of content please make sure to like And subscribe and I also have a patreon if you're interested in giving more to the channel anyways like all my tutorials you can find the footage in the description below so go ahead and download that then we're going to go ahead and launch nuke now if you're working in Nuke non-commercial you're going to go ahead and have to render out a image sequence of the video just to import that into nuke but since I'm using nuke X we can go ahead and hit R to read in our footage so here's my footage I'm just going to click that and hit open uh now you can see down here if we view our file uh you can see that we have a uhd4k file so like always we need to hit s go into the project settings and then come down to the full size format and make sure it matches so UHD 4K right here and then the FPS you also have to match and you can do that by coming to the video clip right clicking go to properties and then you want to go to details and see the frame rate uh we shot in a uh 29.97 frames per second so we're going to go ahead and hit cancel come back out to here and we're just going to type in that frame rate so 29.97 like that now you can see that we have a super large clip uh it goes all the way into the thousands of frames uh for the sake of our tutorial I'm just going to work in the uh 250 frame range you can see that that's automatically set that there um so now we can go ahead and uh close all of our nodes and get ready to camera track now let's go ahead and hit tab to add a new node I'm going to look up the camera tracker node and we can see that we have uh this new node so we can just uh connect the source to our clip and then view our camera tracker so if you actually camera tracked inside of blender before you'll notice that a lot of this is kind of the same things but uh looks a little bit different so what we want to do is uh we have our window up here we want to go ahead and set some tracker markers we're going to let nuke automatically track our uh scene for us since we don't have to do any manual labor so what we want to do is come over here to the settings first of all uh because we can't actually see our tracks we want to preview our features just to uh see what uh nuke is actually trying to select for our features you can see that we actually have some x's those are actually our tracking markers so first thing that we need to do is actually go ahead and set the number of trackers in our scene uh by default it's to 150 but I actually like to increase that to 300 just to have a lot more information also uh since we doubled the amount of features I like to half uh the feature separation so let's just go and uh make this to six and then uh by default uh your refined feature locations should be off and uh we actually want to change that on uh so all those are looking good for now okay so now let's actually start to camera track our footage I'm going to come back out here to the camera TR tracker node and then uh we want to set our range instead of input input is basically going to take the frame range of whatever we set to be our source clip and so that's going to be the Thousand uh you know whatever number that we had set earlier instead we want it to be Global and that's actually going to use our one to 250 frame range down here and so now all we need to do is let uh nuke do all the work and hit trk now the nice thing about nuke's camera tracker is it will actually track all the footage forward and then uh unlike blender it actually tracks the footage backwards again to double check itself and make sure that the trackers are all lined up this is something that I kind of automatically do inside a blender uh but nuke uh basically does it for me and takes a lot of the heavy work away from me so as you can see now that we've gotten to uh 50% on our tracker we can see that uh uh nuke is actually going back backwards now and double-checking all of the tracks to make sure that the position is correct uh in between the frames so we're just going to let that track and I'll come back after that okay so we just finished tracking the scene and just like in blender uh we need to actually go ahead and solve our camera so I'm going to hit the solve button right below where we press track and so that should take uh pretty fast you can see that we uh have some markers that weren't really tracked up here you can see and then we also have one that was actually rejected by uh nuke so what we can go ahead and do is come to the auto track section and then we want to go ahead and delete the rejected so that will actually delete the uh red uh points before and then we also need to delete the unsolved which are these uh little X's up here so let's go ahead and delete those hit yes and then that gets rid of all the uh unwanted markers in our scene uh and so now you can actually see that we have a solve error up here uh 1.87 just like in blender uh we have that solve error uh we want to go ahead and refine our solve so I'm just going to refine all of this that should uh help a little bit with it but we want to try to get this solve error as low as possible uh so what we can do is come down here we have two things the max track error and the max error uh basically as I know this is uh the max error is taking each track and basically the highest error it ever reaches is uh that number and then the max track error is basically the average error of the track blender actually only uses uh the max track error but nuke lets us decide which one we want want to actually decrease so what I like doing is going ahead and decreasing the max error down a little bit because we don't want big jumps in our frames um so say one frame is tracked uh pretty solid and then we uh all of a sudden have a jump it's actually going to throw off our um solve error so let's go ahead and select that uh we can see that it's selected some over here we want to go ahead and delete those rejected ones hit Yes again and then we just want to kind of repeat the process try and get the solve error down so now that we have our Max error down to a pretty high threshold uh six is pretty uh pretty good range for it to be in we actually want to decrease the max track error and so when I decrease this you can see it's selecting some over here we don't want too many uh to be deleted uh since we still want a lot of data in our scene so I'm going to go ahead and delete these so again delete rejected and hit yes and so now we can see our solver is uh gotten lower to a 1.16 and so uh we can actually go ahead and do this a couple more times to try to refine our um solve as much as possible the only thing that you want to make sure of is to not have uh too few of markers throughout your scene you can see still see that we have a ton of markers throughout our scene uh I think that actually helps is if you come over here and you can play around with some of these graphs uh you can see that this is our error Max um so right there so this is basically just a graph of where we can see all of our errors and so so what I'm going to do is if I come down here we can notice that a lot of our errors are still uh pretty high pretty high above uh the one threshold so I'm going to uh decrease this a little bit like there uh we can go ahead and delete those rejected and I also want to go ahead and uh bring down our Max error to get some of those out so let's do that delete rejected now we have a below a one pixel range for our solver so let's refine our solve one final time and then we can go ahead and deal with the 3D stuff on our scene we can see we've uh gotten down a little bit more let's go ahead and delete the rejected one last time to get some of these out of there and so now what we need to do is actually go ahead and set up a scene inside of nuke uh to act as our camera track scene so what we can do is come back out to the camera tracker setting we're going to unclick both of these boxes basically the new beta is uh something that they're testing out with their 3D uh kind of setup uh I don't really like where it's at at the moment um but in the future if that does change of course check that and also link output is basically going to whatever we create here which is going to be a scene it'll link that output so whatever changes we make into our camera tracker node is actually going to automatically update I don't really like that nuke does that I find that uh it kind of gets in the way of my organization of the scene and also um just anytime that I need to make changes I can always come back here and create a brand new one uh automatically uh by myself so I like to have that control but you can of course play around with that if you want so what I'm going to do is uh select camera and we're going to do we're just going to make a new scene and create that and you can see down here in our nodes uh it's actually created uh these three nodes so a new C node a camera trer uh Point Cloud node which we don't actually need I'm just going to go ahead and delete that I never really use that um but you can see over here we now have two Circle nodes and all these Circle nodes are are basically the 3D uh section of nuke now I'm not going to really go too into depth about the 3D side of nuke uh since that will be a whole another tutorial later uh but the main thing that we need to know right now is uh go ahead and hit tab we're going to add in a scan line render the 3D classic and just plug that there plug the camera section in there and then the uh objects and scene into there and then our background we can go ahead and make our footage and now if we view that and come up here and hit tab uh we actually see that we do have our camera uh tracked in the scene uh with all of our uh points now one thing that I want to call attention to if you do hit tab again you can see that our points are kind of randomly thrown uh everywhere uh we have a general idea of where the floor is and it's actually done a pretty good job of trying to automatically orientate that uh but we want to go ahead and set what our ground plane is inside of uh um nuke itself so let's come back out to the camera trucker node I'm just going to view that Again by hitting one and then what we can go ahead and do is let me make this a little bit bigger so we can see is we want to go ahead and Define our uh ground plane and so to to do that we're just going to come kind of at the start of our footage and select all the points on the ground where um they the ground would actually be so maybe some of this stuff uh we want to be careful cuz some of this stuff might be raised off the ground and that might throw uh nuke off a little bit so with all those selected now I'm just going to right click ground plane and set to selected and then I'm just going to come you know every 50 frames or so and kind of just select any new points that come around um and nuke will do a good job of trying to guesstimate the rest but uh I just like kind of manually doing that as much as possible uh just trying to get as many markers uh manually set to be our ground plane as we can just to uh kind of get the you know automatic error out um so set two selected and then 200 looks like he got all the points there and then at the very end of our footage let's just see okay so it looks like we got a a good chunk of the actual floor points so what we can do is since we've already exported out a scene inside of uh nuke um and we didn't we unchecked the link output it actually didn't update uh update anything over here and that's what I like to do so now that we've changed some stuff uh inside of here the only thing that we really need to change is uh the camera because the camera carries all the data with it so what we need to do is go ahead delete the camera over here and we're going to come back here instead of scene we're going to set it to camera and then just create that and that's created a brand new camera that has all of our new data in it so we can just set the camera there I like setting the camera also to my scene over here uh and so now if we view that we can see um if we come hit tab again to go into the 3D section you can see that that's uh done a much better job of setting our ground plane and all those pink dots are basically all the uh points that uh we told nuke that are our ground plane and so that is pretty much it of uh nuke camera tracking uh to go one step further if you actually want to go ahead and uh you know export this out let's say we want to export an fpx uh file to use in another program uh I can quickly show you how to do that now keep in mind that every single program uses a different scale um for their actual scene so if for whatever reason you ever need to change the scale of the entire scene what you can actually do is come to the camera tracker and then we're going to go to the settings uh sorry actually scene over here and then we have this Universal uh uniform scale and so I find for blender that uh the scale is super low and so I'm going to set mine to 100 like that so we just have a huge scene uh again we need to change our camera so so I'm going to delete the camera go to that create that and that should have updated uh everything that it needs to um so you can see it's basically 100 times larger and so now what we need to do to actually render out an fpx is to go ahead and add a right uh Geo node so right here and then plug that into the scene uh and make sure your camera is plugged uh into that scene uh because whatever we plug into the scene if you have any other um like you know cards uh which is basically just a plane or even like a cube like that if you have any of those inside of the scene that will also be exported as an fpx so what I actually am going to do just real quick is add a key uh card right here and then if we zoom in we can see it's kind of orientated weird uh we're going to set the orientation to be uh ZX like that so it's actually on the floor plane now I'm going to hit um I believe it's uh R to scale that up a bit I'm just going to scale that up uh so we can see it inside of blender um so that is looking all good let's go ahead and um make sure everything is connected okay so what we want to do is go ahead and set the file type to be fbx I just find that fbx is kind of the most standard uh file format uh for a lot of programs then we want to come up here and save it in a uh new location uh at the very end we do want to make sure we type in fbx uh just to make sure it saves it as that X uh fbx file and then hit open and we can go ahead and execute that um we do want to make sure our frame range is uh correct it might set it to input uh we just want to make sure it's on global so um the one to 250 like we had set up at the beginning of our uh scene and then hit okay and it should render out uh the fpx okay so now let's actually demonstrate how uh how it works inside of other program so I'm going to go ahead and open up a default scene inside blender just going to hit a to select everything and delete that and then we can go up to file import and a fbx file and then we're just going to uh locate wherever we save that right here and then we can just import that in and you can see like I said uh blender uses a different scaling method than uh nuke so it's actually super super small so what I'm actually going to do is go ahead and shift a at a empty plane axis just going to select all of our objects that uh it made and then are empty and then contrl P set parent to object just select our empty and uh I can just you know SI scale that up a little bit maybe even come over here to that go to viewports display and then uh make our size a little bit better so now you can see that our uh basic camera track is inside of blender uh the floor plane is again on the uh floor plane of blender so that's very nice uh let's go ahead and set the background image just so we can see so background image movie clip okay so open that clip Up again this isn't a blender tutorial I'm just kind of demonstrating this to show that the camera has tracked and we can use it in separate programs so now say I want to you know put a cube in the background over here um we can just hide uh this ground plane for now you can see that uh with nuke we've actually gotten a pretty good camera track um inside a blender and uh we can go from there okay guys that is the new camera tracking workflow hope you learned a thing or two I am working on a nuke tutorial Series so just stay tuned for that I'm getting everything prepped and ready to go make sure to like And subscribe if that sounds like something that you would like to see anyways I will see you guys in the next tutorial

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 4,553

Keywords: blender vfx, blender camera tracking, vfx blender, nuke vfx, nuke vfx tutorial, nuke camera tracking, nuke tutorial for beginners, nuke beginner tutorial, how to camera track in nuke, nuke tutorial, beginner nuke tutorial, free nuke tutorial, nuke camera tracking tutorial, how to camera track in nuke for beginners, nuke vfx camera tracking, vfx, cgi, camera tracking, best way to camera track, nuke camera tracking tutorial for beginners, beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx, nuke

Id: 2jeN14WYatE

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023