TUTORIAL - Basics of PFTrack

so one of the crucial steps in the entire visual effects production pipeline is tracking and layout there's a whole lot of intricacies of this there's a lot of programs you can use there stuff like cynthaiz PF track booze you just getting nobody uses booze you but yeah PF track scent dyes that's usually gonna be the ones that you run into a lot now I tend to find that a lot of production studios like to go with cynthaiz because it's an overall cheaper program I was originally trained on PF track so that's what I'm gonna teach you guys today so this is gonna be the Complete Idiot's Guide to tracking in PF track alright so let's get into it so opening up the program for the first time and go I'll give you this weird loading thing Yatta Yatta Yatta sure does take it sweet ass time alright here we go so this is gonna be what you see when you first start up the program right and a lot of this isn't gonna make a ton of sense but I'm gonna help you through it and assume that you don't know anything about it so the first place that you're gonna look at is right down here where it says create none of this has a really unconventional layout kind of drives me nuts but just like ZBrush it is what it is so right here you have to hit create and what this does is it creates a project for you it gives it an output path and everything and I'm gonna give it a name called test and then you have to give it an output so I'm gonna hit these three little dots I'm gonna create a folder I'm gonna call it test double click on that bad boy hit choose and now our project is created all we have to do is hit confirm second UA confirm everything changes now you have three four little bitty windows up here not a whole lot of this matters this is how you can navigate your way to a shot which is fine it's kind of clunky it's weird there's not like an open and it takes you there like any normal last program would because every one has to be different right so one thing that you can do and you might not know is you can just grab a shot and I'm grabbing it from my second monitor which I'm not capturing and just drag it on here and what is it gonna do is gonna give you an X but the X will turn into this plus and when you that lets you know you can add the shot in so do it again it lies to you and then it and then it figures it out I don't know it's a weird program thing but now our shot is in the program and in order to get tracking on this bad boy we're gonna bring it over here and this that's the shot up so this window right here page one whatever like here's our shot you can scrub it this is 4k footage it does have to cache it so you can see the line turning green as it as it goes long that's it caching it one frame at a time and you can watch this thing through and kind of cache it all right there goes now it's playing smoothly so it's all cached in now depending on how much RAM and what kind of computer you're using and what kind of everything about your setup like depends on how much of a shot can actually be cached sometimes it won't even make it all the way through and this line will like out it ends up doing it a lot like After Effects does kind of pisses me off this lets you know all your information now one thing about the frame rates inside PF track is you never want to have anything that says like 23 976 or any of that you want it to be straight 24 it doesn't account for drop frames inside PF track neither does 3d studio max which is why it should be loud it should be that way so if you bring a shot in this is 23 976 be sure to change it to 24 so now that that's out of the way we can drop our first node this entire program is node based so the first one that you're going to want to put on this guy is gonna be auto track so now that we have Auto track on here I can show you how to use it so candidate number target number these two are pretty important these are gonna be how many selected features on here it attempts to find and how many it will try hard to keep so if I tell it I want it to try to find no less than 250 features but I wanted to try to keep a hundred because this is a big detailed shot and there's a lot going on in it there's some parallax and all this stuff so I wanted to just find as much information as possible and then I can pare it down to what I need later additionally when you go to search mode right here it can you can ask it better speed better accuracy optical flow now the slowest one by a mile is optical flow but it really puts extra time into like solidifying the features I'm gonna go with better speed just because I don't think the shots gonna be too much of a problem and optical flow tends to kind of up from time to time it does have its place but I'm not worrying about that right now you can always test it out on your own the end result is going to be kind of the same if not a little bit cleaner it does better at cleaning up the information after it's done tracking and deformation since there's parallaxing going on in the shot I'm on it I'm gonna want it to account for rotation scale and skew and then that's gonna be it basically so all we have to do now is hit Auto track and you can see what it's doing here like all the purple information it's not really sure about but the yellow ones it's really liking and it's gonna keep those as selected features and it's gonna go all the way through this shot to the very end and then it's gonna go back through it again backwards just to double-check it solves Oh finally done Jesus Christ that takes a long time now to show you what we got here now the first thing you're gonna notice is and especially in areas like this tree right here there's all kinds of information like popping around and pop it in and doing all kinds of crazy and I know that this shot is like seven seconds long so essentially any features that I'm gonna want to keep are gonna be on screen at most of the time you're gonna notice that there's a lot of information up in this tree but these yellow lines are like really blending into these greens and in order to get that to pop out so you can see what your features are doing you can hit this little Sun guy right here darken the image so overlaid items are more visible click that guy and now you can really see what you're dealing with here and there's a lot of good information and there's a ton of bad information so the first thing we've got to do is get rid of all the trash and the way I do that is I go into this box I hit length and it puts the shortest ones at the top now the shortest one is five frames because my minimum length right here is five frames if I change that to one frame then there just be everywhere I changed it to ten then it would be a little bit more selective so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna get rid of all the trash below ten I mean I could have set that but I want to show you this feature just in case then it's gonna grab all this crap pop it everywhere and I can just delete it so already things are looking a lot cleaner there's a lot less junk going on there's a lot less trash now as a rule of thumb trees are not very reliable sources of tracking information they they're they pop around they don't have to find edges it's not like tracking this corner of the building right here this tree is kind of like Donal going all over the place there's lots of information in there but it's not gonna do me a whole lot of good and more often than not it's gonna up my track so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this marquee tool and I'm gonna go in here and just grab a lot of this trash and delete it now you have to hit delete twice weirdly but it's not that bad so grab it delete it Brad delete it move down a little bit a lot of this stuff is gonna pop on and off a ton but so it's a little bit of a process to just go through here and clean this up you don't have to get every single one of them unless one of them is just egregious and we're gonna be able to see which ones are causing you the most trouble later on in this process so I wouldn't worry about it so much now you're just trying to really clean up the garbage so it doesn't affect any of your tracking grab all this junk that junk just keep track crabbing junk now the next thing I'm going to want to show you is places to look out for right so one that I can see right off the bat jumping out at me is the bumper on this car this is a false corner right here where this bumper meets this shadow and the reason that's a false corner is if you look at it the car is moving independent of the shadow because it's in the foreground the shadows in the background that's a false corner and that's gonna your up so you're gonna want to look out for these little guys see this got a whole bunch of its moving across the reflections on this car cars are really tricky things that are really reflective are really tricky they suck a whole lot power lines like this corner right here where it's grabbing it in between where this these power lines and this thing are like I don't trust any of that getting rid of it right same thing with this guy getting rid of it that one's fine because it's up on the corner but you can see here that this stuff is just it's just you're just asking for trouble when with areas like that so do your best clean it up keep rolling around keep rolling along get all this trash out of here keep cleaning it up keep cleaning it up alright so let's see I mean there's still some areas like that kind of fine whatever but no it's not looking too bad right we got only good information nothing's really popping around like crazy bad you do have to look out for ones like this guy so if you see this guy goes like oh I'm perfect that shoot if you just want to remove that one frame you can select this guy and then you can remove - or remove + so you can see right here that the one frame is going this way and if I remove - gets rid of that guy now you can get really anal about this and go into like all these dudes and like fix all of them okay so they're doing that like this guy right here so you see this guy he's doing the same thing he screws up he up for a frame and then he's good so I want to just get rid of that one frame - now there's gonna be a lot of that you're gonna see it kind of everywhere and you can go as crazy as you want to go but I think it's looking pretty good for now I'm feeling confident enough to want to try to get a solve out of this guy and kind of see what I'm working with before I go through and make any more you know widespread changes or deletions but before I do any of that we're gonna add another node to the to this stack the other most important node is user track now user track is great and it's what takes precedence over Auto track it's gonna bait the program basically and the stack of things is gonna use the user tracks more as the foundation of what your shot is gonna be so this allows you to place your own selected points that you want to be more important than everything else so if you know that there's gonna be a giant blown out hole CG crazy happening right here and your gonna want to track the out of this with user tracks Auto track can do whatever the hell it does but centralized your user tracks around the area where you know the effect is going to go right but I'm not putting an effect on the shot I'm just showing you how to track it so I'm just gonna attract the most prominent features I laid one of these guys down but sorry so I'm gonna show you how to create one of these dudes so you can hit create and wherever you click once create is grayed out it's gonna create a thing now this is 4k footage and again this is where your computer kind of comes into play the footage is really high quality the bigger this box is gonna be the longer it's gonna take to track that feature this box can be kind of like whatever the a lot of the stuff that you see in the you in the and the Auto tracker are present in the user tracker it's just kind of looks different so you get best accuracy deformations I want to turn all these guys on all that's good as a failure threshold don't worry about any of that generally the default stuff is pretty solid just when you change all this stuff around be sure that you hit set default and that way every future tracker that you create will have all this information already in it so now you just place your feature that's gonna be its frame one I'll show you that a second and then you just track forward see what it gets you all right now it stopped because it got kind of unsure the camera is moving around a whole lot that doesn't mean that it failed because you can watch what's going on right here and if it stops you can just continue it to push it forward all the way to the end because that feature is there the whole time now all to go the other way all you have to do is go back to your original source frame right here and then track the other way all good so that suckers on there for the entire length of this shot pretty perfectly and all we have to do now is keep doing that we're gonna place a feature all the settings are still there track forward let it do its thing also be sure when you're placing features to like spread them out you know you're gonna want some over here and some over here and some over here I'm just tracking this whole shot so I see this window back here and it's awesome so I'm gonna grab that whole guy cool so you can actually see here that I made my inside window a little bit bigger and now it's taken its sweet-ass time tracking this guy and I'm using a fairly powerful computer so I would just keep that in mind like this can be a very slow process especially when you're working on a bigger footage if you don't have the hardware to back it up then just expect to go slow all right so here's the first lesson that I'm gonna give you with one like this now this feature gets all the way to the to the edge right here and then it's gonna wipe off but you can see that the tracker remains you don't want that that's gonna your up because it's still gonna be processing this tracker past the point of it not tracking anything so in order to remove those frames those excess frames that you don't want it to be active you just have to go to the last frame blue shows you where it's tracking and then all this other stuff that doesn't have blue shows you where it's not and in order to get rid of that you just have to hit this R right here or this H R will remove the excess frames H will hide it I'll remove H hides it now when you play the the tracker back and you see it's on there it will disappear when you get to that frame that means it is no longer active it is no longer tracking that's super super important because if one of these guys is left on out of all the ones you're gonna put on this shot then it's gonna your track up just be prepared for it here's another perfect example of this I'm gonna do this point right here totally fine trick it down it's on there pretty well shrink that down not too bad track forward and then it's gonna hit that wall and stop OOP I'm gonna back up a frame just one and then I'm gonna remove and hide cuz I don't want the rest of it I just want that front bit right there OOP gone right so remember that you're gonna want to do that on every one of these guys tracking this guy if this if it's not on there for a hundred percent of the shot which a lot of the times depending on the complexity of the shot it won't be if you're gonna want to turn these things off because it will completely screw your track all right so here's another little lesson - so you see this guy right here this little black guy now this program will probably track this just fine if I were to take this trekker and put it right on here like that it would probably track it but say I want it to give it a little boost I want to change the color space and the contrast and stuff of this shot to like pop that little area out a little bit more here's how you do it so once you have your shot setup you can come down here to enhance now enhance you can completely color correct this whole guy so if I turn on my curves and I started messing with this you can see that a lot of the detail in this shot starts to pop out and I can get this stuff to be a little bit more contrast II to help it out now this is a low quality shots not like I've made this on the red or anything but honestly it really really helps like bring out little details if I want to track these individual guys like you can see what it's like before and after and it really really helps it out so now if you come back into parameters this is the this is my shot where I'm doing all my tracking and I can just continue on it doesn't really slow the shot down or anything unless you're using any of the denoise functions or any stuff like that you can pop out details just so you can see now that there's all kinds of good stuff there's stuff here and here and here and here like I could put a hundred of these trackers on this shot if I wanted to it wouldn't be a very big deal it would just take a whole lot of time because the shots like 180 frames and you know then you got a track each one of them and you're seeing how long it's taking to just do one sometimes when you're in a crunch sometimes when you have to get a shot out really quickly you have to be very efficient about where you put these things I'm just kind of showing you a handful of features that can help you along with this whole process cool all right and then you just keep adding features man like this is the job you so here's an interesting thing that happened right here with this one so as I was tracking this window it decided to go crazy on me you can tell it's sad to go crazy because you can look at the path right here now one of the interesting things about this is generally if if it starts going crazy like this kind of like finding it and jumping on and off it's because that this outer search area is seeing a similar shaped object and you might be able to fix it just by stepping through one frame at a time now this button will track backwards in sequence but this one will just do one frame and if I do one frame maybe it'll work yes it did right so you can get through this tough area just one frame at a time oh that one didn't work but then again you can just move it that's tactically dangerous when you move it like that because there's no guarantee you can see that there's a shift in it right here and maybe at this point nope so what I would have to do in this situation is take this outer search area and shrink it to this to make sure that it's not seeing the other one and then I'm going to blow it all away and track it again see work pretty well just keep going here's another thing since I have this color correction on here and right now it's kind of with me because I want to get this corner right here but my color correction is blowing it out so I'm just gonna turn it off now come back to here and continue on with my tracking you don't have to use the color correction if your shot has enough contrast inherent in it then you don't have to even do a whole lot it's just an option it's just an option like any other it's there to help sometimes it's there to hurt but it really really depends going from shot to shot so at this point I've got a lot of good trackers on here like these things are really really working pretty well so mixed with what I already have in my auto track which looks like this I'm gonna go ahead and try to do a camera solve on this shot and just see what I get at this point because I may have to come back and add more I may have to mess with my auto track but I kind of just want to see what I'm working with so in order to do that you're gonna go to user track you're gonna right-click you're gonna go to camera solver now everything is gonna turn purple nothing is solved and before I touch anything I'm just gonna go to frame 1 and hit solve all and see what happens and honestly it did a pretty good job right like nothing's lined up but the track looks solid for the most part now this is when you can start to notice bad stuff like I missed a whole bunch of stuff in this tree right and as you move the shot you can see ones like this this guy right here just kind of like floating out in nowhere and that's bad now a couple of ways you can handle this if you have like one guy who's just floating out in the middle of nowhere screwing up your track then when you select him and you see that it's an auto track if you go to auto track he will still be selected right here and I can just delete his ass now that's not really gonna work because I missed way too many up in this tree so again like it's gonna be me to go through this guy and just kill a lot of problem areas before they're ever a problem like all this stuff up here stuff that it's not really sure about that guy anything in this tree like so much in this tree jeez now this is one way to do it just deleting away all this stuff that just isn't really working additionally if I were to grab these two and copy paste right here there is another way you can go about it say if I wanted to let's just delete this Auto track and create a new one right say I want to track this guy again but I don't want to worry about these trees at all well if you go into mask right here and you can create a quick little roto shape around your problem areas and anytime you move this guy it's gonna key one way you can do it is you can actually track forward and backwards and it'll try to keep its around the shape I hate that and since this shot like isn't too bad I'm just gonna go like every 20 frames and and just kind of move this guy around basically you're just gonna build a garbage matte around it to keep it from being a problem also this isn't me being exact in any sort of respect at all this is just me eyeballing the out of this stuff with this sort of method you don't need it to be super magical perfect you just need to get this guy out of here so it's not taking it into consideration with the track or wasting track marks on it cool so now I don't have to worry about that anymore additionally if I want to create another road of shape for these guys then that's an option too cool so now what you're gonna see is when I go back to parameters and how am i tracking information I got to put it back in here BAM we're gonna do 200 100 AutoTrack so now you can see what it's doing is it's completely disregarding all this tree nonsense and it's using more features in the areas that I want it to go because those trees were doing nothing but up my life at this point like this is gonna help a whole lot there will still need to be some cleanup sweet so now that the trees have been completely punched out we can kind of play this guy back take a look at it now there's a whole lot more information going to the areas that I want it to go to there's still a lot of crap there still needs to be some cleanup there just doesn't need to be needless clean-up on the areas that I liked you know like I still come down here to ten hit delete on this guy and now you can see that now that I'm disregarding the trees and all the nonsense that it was causing stuff is looking a whole lot better like there's a lot more information in the places that I want it to go to we still have to worry about places like the bumper of the car or its creating all this and kill all that stuff you know like small price to pay truthfully but it put a lot more information in areas like this because it wasn't wasting these points on the tree right because I only get a maximum of 200 candidates to work with so I want each one of those to go in an area that I that's gonna be useful to me so now I can just go through and do some real simple cleanup not have to worry about this tree all I have to worry about now are false corners like this guy where this power line is crossing through those things are always gonna be a problem there's no real way around then you don't want to have to make a roto shapes for all that kind of stuff you just kind of got to deal with it it's relatively small price to pay for you know what you're gonna get out of all this once again we're looking pretty good but you can see right here is I duplicated my shot and I have an auto track like right over here now the neat thing about this is I can just delete that Auto track unlink this one and then pipe this one in to my previous shot and now solve again OOP and this is looking pretty good right like it's not too bad I still have some problems there's still a lot of floaty bits like perfect example this guy right here he's an auto track I have them selected I hit delete and honestly because this is a longer shot with lots of you know stuff popping on and off I can continue to mess with this now so I'm going to bring this down to like 15 frames and delete all the excess information right not a problem come back into here solve it again now look at that that's pretty good again we got a floater come out to here delete come back to camera solve see all these guys right here again we can go to marquee grab all this nonsense come back the auto track delete them all come back to here solve it alright now look at that that's pretty solid so here's an interesting thing about what PF track does when you get to the camera solver portion now I just solve this without inputting any information and when you look at areas like this right here you see it like it's guessing the focal length local ranged field view pixel aspect ratio all this stuff it's just putting in an educated guess now if you know all of this information then you can put that information in on your own and it will work it will help PF track figure this thing out a lot a lot better so you can see in here I have a lot of these red dots and all this kind of stuff so say I don't know the focal length they just hand me a shot they didn't write down any of that information which is going to be I'm gonna guess 90% of the time that you're ever doing this you can find the focal length yourself especially on shots like this so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna park in the last frame and I'm gonna unlink it right here in the beginning so I have my three nodes and I'm gonna add a node at the very top the node is gonna be estimate focal so with us to make focal let's turn the ground off this allows me to line up axises that I draw in myself and based on those accesses and the field of view it will tell me the focal length so this right here is the x-axis red so you just come up in here and you line them up on parallel lines so I know one is there and I know one is here alright so that looks like that and you go to the y-axis so this is top to bottom come here go there and then come over here to there right and then we're gonna do Z blue is Z so we're going away from the camera this time something like that and we can come down to these windowsills actually the bottom of this and do that so now that's what it gives me right but it's telling me that the focal length is like twenty-eight point five which means it's thirty but I'm gonna leave that in here so you can pipe this back into your thing come down here and hear a camera solve and you can see right now it says known and it's 28.5 exactly what we found out in this so if I were to solve this again now you see that a lot of those Reds went away and they were replaced with greens because now it's really sure of itself it's like I'm pretty sure where all this stuff is all this is looking pretty good it'll pop in and out of red but if you want to clean it up even further you can go to errors right here now a good rule of thumb is if you hit fit view these are basically the quality levels of all the trackers you put on this shot now they're jumping up and down nothing is above five which is five is bad what you want is for almost everything to be underneath at least to the lower it gets the better your track is but you have a lot of information here I have a lot of information here that is way above two so I want to just get rid of all that information right and you can do that with this trim option when you turn on trim it gives you a line and basically anything underneath this line it's going to take into consider but anything above it it's gonna forget about so I just move it down to two and there's a ton of information here that it's gonna take into consideration right it's gonna mainly use all this really good data and if you hit refine all it's gonna lock it in so now you'll see that there's white and there's a ton of green but there's hardly any red hardly any at all like maybe like it pops in for a frame or something but this right here is a pretty rock-solid track like it's looking pretty good now my ground is up and that's gonna lead me to the next phase so the next phase is view ports right say you want to see what your world space is looking like and you can do that by clicking this guy right here this two window setup here's my shot here's what my world is looking like when it comes to the data and already you can see all right there's the ground up here's the wall it's looking pretty good right that was pretty accurate goes all the way back to the windows and so that's not too bad and we can align this ground to help us out so we're gonna go back to this and we're gonna create another new node and it's gonna be called orient scene BAM so with orient scene we can basically move this ground plane around and make sure that our that everything kind of lines up in 3d so it's set to none when you go to edit mode because basically at this point whenever you select a feature like if I grab this green guy right here right you can hit set origin and it will snap the grid to that guy BAM and you can see that it's actually there in the shot like it actually moved it if I were to move it to this guy set origin moves the whole thing over move it to this guy set origin moves the whole thing over so at this point what we can do is we can rotate the world till we know the the ground is lined up well and you can do that by just coming in to these additional options rotate you know all right grounds like kind of off rotate cool rotate cool still skewed something like that and now you can see that this thing is looking pretty good like it's pretty well on there you can rotate in this viewport but it tends to go crazy on you additionally there are other options in here like scale and so with fly what you can do is you hold alt and if you left-click you can rotate this guy around and sort of you know freeball it a little bit additionally if you hold alt and right-click you can just move it around sort of laterally those are all just additional options so this is all looking pretty solid right this ground lines up pretty well and everything seems like the perspective is really correct and I have tons of trackers and the scene to help me out now in order to check it again make sure that everything is looking really good so if you really want to check this guy again we can add another new node which is called test object whoops BAM test object so here we have test object and what test object does is it lets you you can import your own models into this you can put like a human male you can put like boxes all kinds of stuff I'm just gonna use the thumbtack because it's in the program when you double-click on it it's gonna create it in the viewport you can go to none set it to place at selected feature and then drop it in the world just by clicking on one of these one of your track points and there you go there's a 3d object perfectly tracked into your scene you can delete as you can duplicate as many of these guys as you want and place them at different features just to make sure that your world looks right you can see it's way back there which is pretty accurate um and then duplicate again do this so now you can see that I've got some 3d objects in my scene looking pretty sexy right now that's gonna let me know that if I want to put a car here or a robot or any of this that my perspective is gonna be correct that the tracking is gonna be there that he's locked to the environment and that's all looking pretty good but say we want to go step further right um aside from test objects which are great I'm going to move this off to the side I'm gonna use one called image modeling now this is a cool one and one of my favorites so what image modeling does is it lets you use the track points that you've created in your scene and sort of create geometry out of it so if I hit this guy right here BAM it'll use my track points like this and what I can do at this point is I can draw on this guy like that so now I've got a piece of geometry and if you go to the outside of this you can see that that geometry is in my scene right there now a lot of these points are gonna be kind of all over the place so you got to be a little careful about where you place them you can see that I had a point that I selected in the middle of there that didn't look very good uh honestly when you get to this phase if you're like I want to create I want to replace all of these windows then you would have to go back up to user track and then individually track each corner of these windows all the way through the shot but once you do that and you come down here and you go to draw you can pretty much do whatever you want right like you can put stuff wherever you want like I can just kind of grab this whole area like this put down a piece of geometry right like that geometry is gonna move with those points because it's in perspective space like that so that entire wall is gonna be good and the next thing you can do is go to an area where it's lined up pretty well say I have my geometry and it's looking really good I can add another new node called texture extraction select my guy go to camera four UV projection hit generate and I can paint the textures from the video down on two pieces of geometry like that see that and now when you come out here there it is pretty neat huh and that saves you a ton of time because it lines up pixel perfect since your track is really really good and you can actually bring this texture out here's your UV s like it looks like crap because I'm just slapping this together for you but you can you can make this thing work you can increase the size of this texture map to like 2,000 mm come to a good area where it's nice and lined up paint it through and you've got a 2k texture map of your environment now that is perfectly tracked in to this scene and there's a lot you can do with that if you want to Bluff if you want to burst out all these windows and make crack glass texture Maps on all of them and like track them in and 2d you can totally do that at this point and it'll look really good these are all just things you can use I mean there was one thing that I worked on one time where you know like a dead Tiger corpse needed like claw marks on its face for some TV show I was working on and instead of like you know like 2d tracking in individual claw marks I just 3d tracked the shot created simple geometry for its head texture projected it brought it into Photoshop painted on some scratches put it right back on and after-effects and call it a day and I had the whole shot done in like 45 minutes that would have taken another person like a really long time to like get this stuff done this is a really cheap and simple way to get really cool effects if I turn this I turn my lighting back on you can't even tell where that geometry is except when there's perspective shifting right since I slap this together like the foreground looks really good but you can see where it slips right here and I you have to be wary of these areas and you can just paint it like that not a problem just be mindful because I'm I didn't do this very very well or efficiently because I'm it's for the purposes of a tutorial but this it works really well when you're really defined about the areas that you want and keep in mind though that when you go back up in your stack to Auto track to create new dots you have to then go back to camera solve solve it again which will throw off your orient scene and your image modeling and your texture extraction all the way down the line so you've got to be sure the first time through that you're getting it all right or you're gonna find yourself redoing a lot of this stuff over and over again it's just a word of warning now I'm gonna this stuff isn't very super crazy accurate but it's good enough for the purposes of this tutorial I'm going to put my test objects back in on the bottom so now when you come to here you can see that everything is in this scene right it's all good so at this point you're like alright I want to export this guy I want to export him and take him to like 3d studio max or something so in order to do that select the bottom node go to export and here we are this is your export module and basically it's kind of default to 3d studio max gives you a world space and all this you can basically find an output I'm gonna send it in to test which is where I have my project file and I'm gonna hit save it's gonna save out a max script which is totally fine um you know screw these tacks and get a about those we're gonna go to texture extraction totally fine come in here to export go to so if you want the textures to come out I have this defaulted to PNG you can change the format however you want to any of these through this you can even give it its own separate output other than that it's gonna send it directly into the same place where your track information is gonna go and at this point you just gotta export so I'm gonna go ahead and export again totally fine it'll let you know exports successful additionally I'm going to make an after effects one which none of the 3d geometry is going to come through in the after effects one only the points will so we're gonna export the scene BAM additionally if you want to export the clip out of PF track you can do it by clicking this guy right here and just hitting export clip I'm not gonna do that right now because it's all good to go so the next step is to open up 3d studio max okay so the first step once you're into max is to make sure that it's set to film and not NTSC because you want this to be 24 frames a second hit okay double check it it's 24 totally fine if you don't do that first step when you import it if your frame rates don't match up it's not gonna set it to it and my puckish it up so let's go to and now we got to go to run script so once we hit run script we just got to go and find the script that it exported since I did two of them hit okay and here's the piece of geometry with the texture applied to it that we created earlier right so let's just sample this guy and Jack a self-illumination up to a hundred so I can demonstrate what's about to happen the next step is to get our footage into the background so to get our footage in the background and to get it playing smoothly this ties into a tutorial that I made earlier that'll go a little bit more in-depth to this but the gist of it is turn on use files have it saying to me have it say animate background and make sure that you make a really small in dimension make a dimensionally proportionate small quick time of the background any of the footage it needs to play in the background or it's gonna be really choppy and kind of shitty like I said watch that tutorial that I posted before this one and I'll give you the gist of it but you can see right here if I go to files it's loading in the 4k version I don't want the 4k version I made a much smaller version and when I hit open and then apply hit okay there it is so now when I scrub it look at that done there so this is where you get to go crazy right you can like make boxes when more boxes and more boxes and since everything is lined up properly when you start scrubbing this guy it's all gonna look good see that so that's tracking 101 basics on taking something from PF track to 3d studio max if you want to take it into After Effects let's load up After Effects hit okay for all my offline plugins because that's always fun alright so I'm going to bring in my footage first we're gonna load it in and this is what's gonna look like so it's gonna be black with a ton of nulls just sitting around being awesome if I lay my footage in on this guy you'll see that it all lines up but the first thing I'm gonna want to do to kind of clean this up a little bit make it a little bit more usable is change these to like ten so this will clean up your space a little bit but it your world space up so say instead of this being that so instead of this so this is the size right like this is how big one of these nulls is but say I want this to be the size of the null at 100 percent right here so if I come here scale you'll see it's at 10 instead of 100 and this can kind of mess your whole world space up so basically a little trick that I always use to bring down the size of everything scale the camera and to scale the world and everything so you know you don't end up with your nulls being you know this big at a hundred percent I take everything below the top null including the camera so I'm gonna take everything below the top null everything except for the top null and then I'm gonna link it to the top null and then I'm gonna change its scale to 100 now you see it didn't change in size because the camera is linked to the null and it's scaling it up with it so now when I grab everything and unlink it all so now nothing is linked you can see that the entire world space has been risk failed to that new size so now we don't have giant null issues and everything tracks perfectly and of course you can just go through here and like wholesale you know delete nulls that you're not gonna need you know like you're not gonna need a lot of these but you never know having that many nulls in your scene can't slow you down a little bit but that's this is all just a you know an overview this is I went really kind of fast and I brushed over a lot of stuff there's a lot of intricacies to this program there's a lot of intricacies to getting it out and into other pieces of software you know I might do a follow up tutorial at some point where I kind of talk about stuff how like the way that it can handle lens distortion and you know facial tracking like that I should probably do a facial tracking tutorial but anyway this will get you started on just bringing a shot into the program tracking the damn thing and then getting it out into another piece of software so you can start adding effects and stuff to it so let me know if this helped at all and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Dan S

Views: 48,720

Rating: 4.9472461 out of 5

Keywords: 3DS Max, PFTRACK, After Effects, Tutorial, Classroom, TroubleShot, TroubleShotVFX, Pixel, Farm, The Pixel Farm, CG, VFX, Animation, Camera, Tracking, Export

Id: 5XOR0h0xKAo

Length: 47min 41sec (2861 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017