Tracking 0-to-60

so the thing about motion tracking or camera tracking or whatever your grandma calls it in blunder um is that it's very complicated right you need to know about actual tracking and solving and you need to know about yourself and you could fall into this trap of watching a bunch of tutorials and never actually starting your own project because there's a lot to learn this tutorial is meant to teach you all of camera tracking everything you basically need to know to get a monkey to be on a plane okay that's why we're here you're just here to get your monkey on the plane and done everything else you can figure out yourself right because you could learn about offset tracking you can learn about what else is normalization we don't care monkey on plane that's why we're here so uh let's get started immediately i have this piece of footage that i recorded by the way available on patreon but of course you could record something yourself i have this piece of footage that i filmed it's me walking with the camera i want to figure out what that camera motion is i'm basically walking down the street towards the fedex thing uh by the way i don't know if you know this fedex has a hidden arrow inside of their ex can't unsee that anymore um have some footage uh main things uh you need to do if you want to film your own make sure your shutter speed something insane mine's like one over 200 if you can go crazy or go crazier you don't want motion blur second of all i close my aperture so that there's no depth of field and third of all i made sure the camera wasn't moving all the way around right it's a bit chaotic but you know you can follow it with your eyes i'm not shaking it crazy because that makes it harder for you um so when when you film make sure you satisfy those requirements or just download my thing off patreon okay we have footage how do we track it well first thing we do is we need to go to the tracking panel in a blender so i'm on blender 2.92 i believe use whatever version of blender you want i don't care recently there's been a update a patch for like the speed of tracking so preferably get a newer one i don't care uh go here go to movie clip editor we're now in the movie clip editor this is where you import and movie clips or you track them where you do masks all this what you can do is you can either click open and then like pick your piece of footage or even easier take your footage click it drag it it's in there beautiful um and again i just want to reemphasize this is meant to be from beginning to end you never have to touch tracking before so if i go over some obvious stuff um my bad when you import in your footage you're going to have all this information on the right you have the resolution in this case it's 1080p footage it also knows that it's 29.97 frames per second basically a lot of useful information first thing i want to do is i want you to make sure that your project settings i guess it's in the output tab are matching this so is this 1920x1080 yes so if it doesn't make sure it matches if you have a different resolution frame rate is a matching no we need to make sure it's 29.97 cool um also render tab color management just set this to standard it's just a thing uh don't worry too much about it it just makes it so that the colors are the same as when we filmed it okay these are the three things you need to do before we begin tracking okay okay cool um so now we have our movie clip inside here you see we can play it um it's being loaded into memory this is what this purple thing is um however since this is only 194 frames as it says right here you can see we run out of footage right so you know it plays it and then we run out so we want to make sure our project end point is set to 194. you can either do that or you can hit set scene frames and it does it for you so it automatically detects uh what the last frame is and you can see automatically 1 through 194 okay um other thing if the if you have not loaded this footage into memory like you haven't played through it and this whole thing is purple just hit this prefetch button we actually have already loaded this into memory so but but that's what prefetch does okay cool let's save this as a mega patreon because it's patreon uh tracking tutorial okay we have officially done everything we need to actually begin the process we've imported into footage we've matched the stuff on the right uh we've matched this project end point okay we're ready um the way camera tracking works and this is just like high level theory like doesn't matter the way camera tracking works is we take a bunch of objects or a bunch of features in our shot we say where are these moving and then once we know where a bunch of pieces and our footage are moving like where is this x moving where is this fire hydrant what am i trying to say once you know where a lot of stuff is moving you can then reverse engineer where the camera's moving so tracking of the camera is done by tracking stuff in the scene okay how do we add in a tracker easiest way is you click add and that is going to add in a tracker i wouldn't recommend doing this instead just hit control click so you hold control and then you click and this lets you actually add in a marker where you want it to be so for example i'm looking for something in my scene that has a lot of detail that i could follow it with my own eye so for example the corner of this x control click you've added a tracker okay once you do this we actually get a track panel this shows us kind of like a enhanced view of what is inside what is called the pattern area this is the pattern we're going to be following frame by frame and if you go to this menu and enable search by the way uh shortcut for this is all to s since you will be using this all the time all to s this is going to be your search window so again pattern area is what we are tracking just the corner of this x and search area is where we are going to be looking for it frame by frame by frame so uh for example if we were to go into our track and you want to make sure this is big enough so that if the pattern moves over here next frame it's within these bounds um so if we go to the track panel whatever you want to call it and we track a one frame forwards yes track selected markers you track one frame forwards you can see now it is following our feature by the way if you want to lock this to the center of the view hit l for lock you can hit this button as well and you can see we are tracking frame by frame by frame and it's leaving this motion trail now again the reason that this tracker is working so successfully is i've picked a good pattern area something that's easy to track like there's orange and then a high contrast difference between orange and white whatever we have that and also our search area is big enough so you can just go frame by frame by frame by frame by frame or you can hit the button next to it to track all the way forwards and you can see um it made it all the way forwards although i don't know why it isn't uh set scene frame to 194 i must have undid that but you can see this tracker now that we play all of it it follows this if it doesn't we need to go back and do some correction in this case we don't so when we're happy with the tracker we don't want to modify anything anymore what you're going to do is you're going to have the tracker selected so if you don't select the tracker hit lock shortcut for that is control l and now this tracker is locked we're not changing it the data exists okay cool um that's how easy it is to add an ad in the tracker okay a general rule of thumb if you want to get a camera track you want to have at least eight of these at all times so we already did one of them super easy okay let's do another and we'll talk about some of this stuff in a second we'll keep it simple for now so i'm looking for some piece of any kind of feature in our shot that hopefully lasts throughout the whole thing so for example this uh little thing over here i don't know what it is something for the fire department i'm sure i'm not gonna track it because you can see as we play the footage it goes off frame right so ideally you pick something that's there the whole time so i'm going to try this i don't know what it is it's just a piece of something on the ground again hold ctrl click we've added in a tracker our pattern pattern area has this thing and our search area now is plenty big enough so let's just check track track track track chat go and frame by frame by frame seems good now that we're happy with it let's track all the way forwards okay uh you can see it track to frame 121 so this is what will happen sometimes it does a successful track and then it's you know it starts you know self-doubting itself it has low self-confidence and your goal here as the guy using blunder or girl um you gotta pat blender on the back and say i know you're not confident it's fine keep going okay so what's happening here is that between these two frames it feels like it's lost the pattern even though it hasn't it's like been perfectly fine up till this point okay again what's happening here is we put in a tracker it now has this image and it's going to try to track this image frame by frame by frame or this pattern whatever you want to call it so on this frame i guess it like changed enough so whatever to fix this what you're going to do is we are just going to scale down this tracker or you can move it i wouldn't recommend moving it you want it to stay in the same spot just scale it or rotate it do anything to it because what that's going to do is it's going to add in a new reference point so from now on when we're tracking forwards it's going to be tracking frame 120 and then forward so this is the new image it's going to be matching over and over and over again so we've kind of overridden the first one okay so you know scale it do whatever and now let's keep tracking and you can see now it's successfully continuing to track let's make it all the way to the end and you can see now it's made it all the way to the end so again what happened here is we had the first frame that's the pattern it tracked it it tried to match it frame by frame by frame but then as we got closer and closer to this like you know i walked towards it it looked different enough that we needed a new reference point that now that would be what is being matched okay cool um you keep doing this uh here's some settings to make our lives easier so these uh settings are what is going to be applied when we add in a new tracker so any tracker we do is going to inherit these settings if i was to make this a pattern area 60 you can see it comes in with a larger pattern area all the settings we do here transfer over here are some settings to make your live lives life one person's watching this easier enable normalize so any tracker we add is going to have the normalized feature what is normalized well i could tell you basically what it means is that lighting variation so if like a little shadow comes over the area you're tracking or it's not as bright one frame to another it's going to try to ignore that the real definition is normalize light intensities while tracking slower so we're making tracking a bit slower in exchange for it being more invariant to changing lighting condition which is a good thing okay also more tracking settings you can pick your correlation number this is basically a percent confidence so basically um every single frame as it moves pattern to pattern to pattern it needs to be 75 in this case percent sure um that it has a match otherwise it's going to stop tracking like that other one did before on frame 121. um if you set this to something like 0.999 so has to be very confident um it's only going to keep tracking if it's a hundred percent sure it's a match um if you want it to be kind of fast and loose bring it closer to zero okay um other than this we have motion models do we want to track only the changing location of the pattern or do we have perspective rotation whatever going on uh let's keep this as is okay so let's pick another feature so make sure again you're on frame one so if you're on another frame just go back to frame one and just so that we're starting from the beginning and we can track the whole thing i've control click to add in a tracker let's go frame by frame by frame by frame seems fine and then let's track forwards and made it all the way to the end perfect uh sometimes a track that won't make it all the way to the end uh will if we change the motion model just the thing okay we have three trackers uh let's do one that probably won't survive the entire shot because it's going to go off frame again i'm just picking things that are high contrast so i wouldn't want like this to be a tracker it's just like a random patch of ground but something that has a dot is perfect so let's go frame by frame by frame seems fine track forwards cool so i made it 33 frames wide because on the next one it's starting to go off frame now it looks like we could get an extra frame of information so let's go one frame forwards where it's lost it we're going to hit g for move and blender g to manually move it and you can see we've like manually extended this by one frame but you want to make sure that we're picking the same area of the dots so i think we want to move this a bit here just so it matches and then ctrl l to lock the tracker so even though this tracker doesn't live for the entire time it's going to be useful information for that part of the shot again ideally you want them to live throughout the whole thing so let's do another control click and soon we'll start speeding through this ctrl t oh by the way why did i hit ctrl t that's the shortcut for track forwards um so you can see here it's lost it so let's go frame back add a new reference point ctrl t ctrl l to lock we have another tracker now we're starting to speed up let's try a weird one i don't know if this will work but let's try the corner of this window um it doesn't need to just be dots on the uh the street right um although you do want some dots on the street since we want to know where the floor is in 3d space but we'll get to that another tracker here let's try tracking it forwards ctrl t nope so this is why the 75 confidence thing is important so you can see um at some point and must have hopped and was confident enough that that was a match yeah so if we set the correlation to something like 0.9 that doesn't happen however since it does seem to like that area let's see if we can track it so let's go frame by frame by frame uh it was just about to be off screen perfect let's track forwards so this one had a bit of a hiccup by the way if you want to see where the hiccup is without like visually going frame by frame by frame you can totally go to this graph information which shows the xy locations of each tracker and you can see like where it's starting to go off like here there's some like bouncing variation we don't want so i'm just going to delete this tracker and try a different one but that's the thing about tracking it's a lot of trial and error and i haven't tracked this shot before since i wanted it to be a clean take or a fresh perspective on how you attract it yourself uh let's try doing a distant thing instead again if it doesn't work we can just go back to tracking stuff on the ground it's not too important so let's go frame by frame by frame l to center it seems to be tracking fine yep there we go um by the way just some general theory i'm trying to keep it light on you when you pick your eight or more trackers you want them to be varying in location so have some of them be in the foreground so for example this tracker is really close to the camera the cone one's super far away so have some variation in 3d space in terms of depth have some variation in 2d space like we have a lot of trackers in the middle one on the left it'd be cool if we had a tracker on the right just put in trackers in different areas it's good for the reverse engineering of the camera motion uh but for now let's keep going i'm thinking i want to track this patch of ground for however long it lasts and because this is kind of like more of a perspective track like it's on a planar surface and as we go closer to it there's some deformation for this one i'm going to change the type of track so instead of location i'm going to either use perspective or affine affine is basically like a shortcut sheet of perspective it calculates faster but is almost the same so i'm going to add in an affine tracker make it a bit bigger so what i want you to think of when you see this is we are tracking that patch of ground in terms of shearing and perspective and all this let's see if that works so frame by frame by frame seems to be fine track forwards cool so i made it this many frames because then it goes off frame fine but you can see that unlike the other trackers that just have this pattern area that move and tried to follow it the affine tracker if you look at the pattern area it actually shifts in perspective like it's changing shape just to match it and if you look at the track window you can see it almost looks like it stabilizes that area so that's what affine is useful for so we'll go to the last frame ctrl l to lock it since we can't get any more information out of that and let's keep going so a couple more trackers until i think we're going to be good to go of course we don't know for sure let's see if we can track this red thing you know there's only one like it so there's no way blender is going to be confused ctrl t seems to be doing pretty good i'm going to go a couple frames back since there's a bit of jitter scale this up so now this is the new reference point ctrl t now i've overridden the track and let's see what this looks like and this is a good area to look at it to see if there's a lot of flickering yes so you can see at this point it starts to get a bit unstable so what we can try is we could manually correct it or you could try a different kind of tracker so again affine is pretty good for these kinds of things so i'm just going to try tracking it like this and you can see now it's tracked all the way let's see if it looks a bit more stable from this tracking window let's stabilize that yeah so you can see different motion models useful for different things so that's actually a great example okay we have another tracker um so far throughout the whole shot we we have one two three wait one two three four five six trackers that lift throughout the whole thing uh let's see if we can swing a few more and then go for the solve which is where we actually use this information i'm thinking let's try to get more background information why not it is useful so i'm gonna track this like church thing all the way in the background uh yes there is a bit of parallax and all this but because it's so far away a location tracker is a fine approximation there we go that tracked super fast uh what else can we do i kind of like the look of that sign although there does seem to be quite a lack of resolution there but we'll see if we can swing it ctrl t let's uh preview this tracker and a lot of times what you'll do is you'll make a lot of trackers and you're going to end up throwing some away that's just the process but this seems fine so technically we have eight let's see if we can get a few more before we continue i feel like there's a good feature up here this white dot let's see if blender can track that it might not be able to okay so i made it this many frames let's update our reference point make the search area bigger yep it seems to be falling okay until we get to this frame again you can either use this window or you could use the shortcut ctrl t to track forwards or alt right arrow to track frame by frame forwards so let's see if that works yep some trackers need a lot of manual supervision and that's just what it is but this seems to be going pretty okay we can do some manual updating if it gives us too much trouble we'll just abandon the tracker yep this is giving us quite a bit of trouble i'll give it a couple more frames before we abandon it but sometimes you know it starts working for a while again so yeah i'm just updating this every frame that it's messing up sometimes doing a manual adjustment but if a tracker is giving you this much error there's a good chance not necessarily by the way if you want to clear uh this next frame that has incorrect information you can just hit this button to clear everything past frame 146. uh what was i saying uh yeah sometimes if a tracker is giving you this much trouble uh there's a good chance that it's maybe not a great tracker to use but from my experience this one does seem like pretty solid so that's why i'm pulling through for it okay it seemed pretty good although we did have a glitch earlier you know what i'm so close to abandoning this tracker let's just keep going with it for a bit so once you've locked it and you want to update it again unlock the tracker that makes it you know we can overwrite the data again and we're just going to fix this making sure that it stays on okay now we seem to be good so let's uh watch this tracker make sure it stays on yes oh nope there are a couple of whatever i'm making a call we're abandoning this tracker oh well um okay so i think we do have eight trackers throughout the shot it appears so uh we will find out soon if these are enough if not we will need to add more trackers but uh we have now maybe finished the tracking process so once you've done this go from the track panel to the you guessed it solve panel yay this is where we use all this tracking information to try to reverse engineer a camera solve again we might get an error because i i don't know we haven't solved it yet we might get an error and if that happens we'll just need to add in more trackers so uh solve panel what do we need to do before we hit solve camera motion first thing you need to ask yourself was this filmed on a tripod in this case no basically what that means is is it put on a tripod and you're just pivoting it around like it's only a it's what's called a nodal pan because it's on a node in this case no we're free moving so make sure that's disabled second thing do you want to enable this automatic keyframe where it's going to pick keyframe a and b for you well before you choose you might want to know what a and b are basically these are two frames any numbers between 1 and 194 in this case so a pair of two keyframes a and b these are two frames where it's going to do the most amount of work in between these two frames is the way you want to think about it so it's going to do all the calculations here and after it does that it's going to extrapolate that okay so we're not doing okay the the best way to describe this is these two frames basically are where the camera solve happens the main math and then everything gets propagated out so if we pick two very good numbers we want to do this ourselves if we are not sure we want to enable this automatically to pick for us how do we know what are good sets of keyframes a and b well that takes a bit of experience but long story short you want to pick two frames that have a good difference in parallax so here are like ra trackers we go down here in reference to each other they look very different don't worry about it too much for now we're going to have it automatically pick for us let's see what this gives us so far so i'm hitting solve camera motion it might give us an error it might get yep it's giving us nan pixels which means uh it's not it's not working we need to add in more tracking information or we could try to manually put in these keyframes which i might try to do but for now let's try to add in another tracker so i'm thinking let's add in some information on the right side here since it seems to be very lacking we could do we'll see if this works it might be a bit tricky but i'm thinking let's try to do an affine track so again it's kind of like pseudo perspective on this patch of bricks let's see what that gives us ctrl t make sure it's locked on so let's see does that look good so it's doing its stretching because we're getting further and closer but it does seem to be staying on the same part of the brick so i'm gonna call it good let's lock it um again once you do this you can totally solve again so i'm gonna enable keyframe let's see if this one works okay so this one actually gives us a camera solve a very bad one so once it gives you a camera solve you will see a solve error of some number of pixels um you want to keep this anywhere near one or below so five is horrible but it does give you a solve and what this means is this is the average amount of drift in pixels that that you're going to get per frame so you want that to be under a pixel if possible um so the name of the game is minimizing this number so we could either do that by adding in more trackers changing settings whatever but before we add in more trackers let me try something so uh we've picked our keyframe a and b 1 and 134 so i'm just going to disable it so it keeps this so if we resolve nothing changes 5.13 we could do it a million times should stay the same what i'm going to do is with these keyframes a and b now selected is i'm gonna enable focal length so this is gonna make blender guess how zoomed in i was during the shot if you know this perfect go to camera go to lens type in your focal length i don't know what i filmed with so i'm going to have it calculate we're going to solve again and you can see that with the very same numbers we just enabled focal length so now it's guessing it's 34. uh we've dropped our our error from 5.3 to 0.88 so from something totally unacceptable to something that's actually pretty okay again one and below is a good thing again there's more theory here but i'm trying to make it one tutorial um so and enable this it really does a good job if you know this number perfect you can get a accurate number also if you know your sensor width like camera information put it in but some people are filming with phones some people are whatever so i'm just going to assume that you don't know this information okay cool so now we have a solver of 0.88 we can drop it even further by adding in more reliable trackers we can look at this like tracking information and be like oh which of these are good and bad but the fact that all of these uh trackers this x and y information are bundled together it almost looks like they're all like overlapping on the same thing that's a great sign okay and then this blue line is basically showing our camera error and that seems to be staying close to zero so there's a bit of variation at the very end but it's looking pretty good so we could add in more trackers to lower our error another thing you can do super easy go to this enable info so now every single tracker we select is going to have this text under it and again what this number means is it's a bit of math but it's going to be our average drift average error per frame that is made up of all these individual tracker errors so you can see this tracker has an error of 1.2 this tracker has an error of 0.93 it's a bit hard to read this tracker is an error of 0.71 and all these numbers average to 0.88 what this means is we can try to find the highest error tracker and make it less contributive to the solve so it's going to contribute less of its error so if i'm looking at all of these i'm looking for the number that is the largest relative to 0.88 and i'm seeing that this brick tracker brick tracker that we added in has an error of 1.79 that is awful okay so i'm going to take this i'm going to change its weight in other words it's contribution how strong it is for the track oh and by the way i don't think i mentioned this um all these settings on the left like i said this is what is going to be inherited by new trackers um all this stuff or when we're in the tracking panel so this is new tracker information all the stuff on the right is per per it's for the individual tracker so once you've already added it and you can change stuff so for example if i lower this to 0.5 or whatever you can see this tracker is still at one it doesn't inherit it to everything uh what was i saying i was saying this thing has a high error so let's bring down the weight in other words it's contribution so i still want it to have some contribution it shouldn't be zero that's called a zero weight tracker they're useful not for this tutorial i want it to be above zero but less than one so let's take all this information i'm going to keep the focal length as is so i don't need to recalculate it so again once we add our keyframes a and b i don't want to solve those again same for focal length let's try to resolve and now we went from 0.88 to 0.69 why because we took our highest error tracker and made it contribute less okay cool um so i think we've done the camera solve now let's try to get it in blender and put that monkey on that point okay we're on that part of the tutorial um so you can see in our 3d viewport nothing's really going on it's just a cube and the whatever whereas in the movie clip editor we have these trackers and the camera solve how do we get that information from here to here and i will tell you after i fix my throat you know talking for a long time is actually kind of hard it's like a muscle that you have to exercise anyways how do we get the information from here to there you don't want to hear about my throat problems how do we do that well uh once you've done you yeah once you've done your solved camera motions again we're going to be in the solve panel what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to i don't know why i can't find the button but what you want to hit is set up tracking scene so again once you have a camera solved you have some solve error that's hopefully less than one you hit setup tracking scene you can see it adds in a plane but also our camera is moving now cool if we actually look at our thing it did a couple things i could put in our footage as the background stuff's moving it doesn't look good right it doesn't look like it the plane's actually on the floor it kind of looks like it's moving with it but not perfectly we'll fix that now but you can see in general stuff's going pretty well in fact what we can also do is if you go to these this overlay options and you enable motion tracking i believe it will show you these empties essentially and what these do i'm sure you can already guess these correspond to different trackers so you can see when i select one it's going to select a different tracker so these are trackers in 3d space not very obvious like what they look like now but we'll fix it so again we have this issue of alignment right we basically have this good solve but like nothing's attaching to anything and here's why for example i want you to look at these four trackers that are also being highlighted here and maybe this one as well these are examples of four to five trackers that are on the floor of what we filmed right these are the floor whereas when we look at it here you can see they're just kind of in the abyss so no wonder it doesn't look like the cube and the plane are on the floor they should be up here we could fix that by either moving stuff to those dots or we could actually like adjust the camera and like do this whole thing so i'm just kind of like lining it up this is going to be a bit of a rough approximation so i'm just kind of like lining it up so that they move and now you can see it it looks weird but at least it is attached to the floor so you can see there's a bit of a bit of theory there about orientation but the cool thing is you don't actually have to do this yourself there's actually a tool in blender to do this so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to select three trackers that should be on the floor and you can see we have this orientation panel with the floor option you just select floor and this will automatically put the camera in a place such that these three trackers are on the xy plane as you can see okay let's see what this looks like it looks good except the thing's massive but you can see it's on the floor now how do we make it look less big well in essence what we want to do is just move this camera away so if this is like the 3d cursor we just want to move it away and that will in effect make this look smaller because it's further right you know what i mean again there's a tool for that so i'm just going to select any two trackers that again we know where they are in 3d space there are like these empties out here we hit set scale and you can pick the number what this is going to do is it's going to say how many units should there be in between here and here so if we pick a big number like five it's going to make everything look small because now there's a lot of space in between those two um and you can use this if you take an onset measurement you could take a measuring tape and you could figure out an exact one for one scale for this i'm just going to pick something like three so that there's a good amount of space but nothing crazy and again what this does is it moves the camera away so let's see looks good um cool we have the floor oriented we have the scale picked it still kind of looks wonky so i'm just going to select the tracker where i want the center or the origin to be so select the tracker hit set origin that's going to move the 3d cursor there or the camera everything is the camera moving but in effect it looks like other stuff's moving okay we've done that uh we can also rotate the camera now um and there is tools for this so you could pick like off the origin you could pick this tracker so again if this is the origin i know i'm not doing a good job of explaining this if this is the origin you can pick another tracker like this one to be the y-axis so you can see this line that's being made between these two trackers which you can totally see here like this green line that's the y-axis you can also turn it into the x-axis and i can see it's a red line you could orient it manu or like that i recommend orienting it manually so i'm just going to select my camera make sure it's off the 3d cursor rotate on the z-axis and that just lets me make my y-axis parallel to this line on the sidewalk okay cool and i can actually just move my objects now in like 3d space to position them where i want them to be and you can see we're pretty much good so again this whole step was about orientation it was about we can close the motion um movie clip editor now it was about putting our camera in the correct place from from the correct distance with the correct focal length all of these things um and you can see now we get a pretty reliable track um even with blunder free software you can get good tracks cool um now how do we put a monkey on the floor and render it okay we we've done the motion tracking let's get to it so first of all you're going to see that a whole bunch of stuff was added as well when we hit setup tracking scene we have a foreground collection a background collection different view layers it's confusing if i hit f12 to render let's see what happens okay we render this that's kind of it whereas in the compositing there should be a lot more going on again it adds a bunch of stuff first thing i want you to do just don't be overwhelmed that's the first thing second thing i want you to do go to the render tab go to film go to transparent this is going to fix the issue where the background was gray instead of you know our actual footage i mean and now you can see it's fixed if we go to another frame and render it so now the cube's like in the bottom right of the frame let's render it you can see it it matches right so it takes the correct frame from the footage overlays it with the render layer we're good okay what's actually going on here is if you go to compositing is it's first taking in our movie clip so that's just the footage without uh you know anything else so again this is our final render with the cube it takes the footage does some camera distortion stuff don't worry about it we didn't talk about it in fact we could just get rid of those nodes it takes this it overlays this render layer so now we've put one on top of the other with this alpha over and then it does that again for the background which is like why do we even have a background it does all that and then it delivers a final render what i recommend to keep this simple is take the background layer delete it we don't need it i want everything in one view layer keep it simple i'm also going to delete these foreground and background collections it's just a whole lot of headache okay i just want everything in one thing so now when we hit render we essentially get the same result in fact we don't need this we don't need this this is as simple as it can be we have footage we have the render the foreground layer and it's putting one on top of the other again we could rename this to like render so this is what's being shown here this is the footage it's putting one on top of the other and that matches for any frame because uh the footage it takes a second but it updates on every single frame it's just that we need a render to match it okay um to make the the monkey on our thing now let's keep it simple i'm gonna go to cycles and let's see what this this looks like i'm going to and it's by the way the plane that it makes should already be a shadow catcher emcee yeah it's already a shadow catcher if you don't have this make a plane um it really you know you could do all of this yourself so just make a plane we're gonna put it over here i'm gonna go to visibility make it a shadow catcher and instead of a cube let's put a monkey not a grid whoops that was a mistake i'm gonna put a monkey in our shot although i feel like this is way too big so let's go to the side view okay we got a monkey putting it on the floor let's see what that looks like in fact let's make both these bigger and by the way any transformation we do to this as long as your camera is always good will work okay we have the monkey we have the shadow catcher if we hit render it's going to take a bit longer than before and it also seems to be glitching out the shadow catcher but whatever it's fine on render um you put the monkey into things so at this point you want to do like all the tricky stuff like you want to match your lighting so you want to make sure your shadow's coming from the same angle as the footage so in this case you can see the shadows a bit to the right and under so i'm going to move my light to be there you can pick your light stuff whatever oh it's because of this uh grid that it's glitching out um you could pick your light settings like how soft should the light be so for example make it a big radius that's a soft light one of zero's a very harsh shadow okay at this point we the the reason i'm stuttering is because i suck at this but but also we've kind of done the thing so at this point if you were to render out the entire clip you will get a monkey that matches the thing so i think my work here is officially done after 35 minutes so there we go guys that is the one tutorial you need to watch to get your monkey to be on the plane i know there was a lot to take in but i tried to keep it simple i didn't talk about offset i didn't talk about lens distortion nothing okay simple maybe at some point i'll make a part two if you guys want a advanced like what else should i be looking for but there you go you did the thing and uh cool what do you see on the right is it a list of times i stuttered during this tutorial no it's a list of a very valuable very dear to me patrons why are people on patreon why are they supporting uh both the cg matter and the default cube channel well one i don't know but second of all they get access to blend files like this one so if you want to play around with this footage that i used and try to check it yourself you can get that on patreon also any other blend any other whatever i've ever uploaded so months and even years at this point of content you can get with a one month subscription on patreon they get that they get early access to tutorials they watch it even before you sometimes multiple days early additionally um exclusive tutorials i do not post on either channel so those are just kind of like more advanced tutorials only for the patrons patrons patreon newsletter discord all of this stuff exists over there so if you are interested there's a link in the description thank you and um yeah you don't need it you've already learned the information but if you want to support the channel and get those benefits that's where they are so hopefully you learned something i'm ready to move on to something else so i'm out of here hope you enjoyed hopefully i hope you had a great whatever day it is bye-bye

Channel: Default Cube

Views: 71,430

Keywords: blender, tutorial, motion, tracking, camera, camera track

Id: 4qKsoJLeg-c

Length: 37min 18sec (2238 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021