Blender 3D Camera Tracking Masterclass

1. Blender Camera Tracking Masterclass: Introduction: Hey, and welcome to this blender camera tracking course. My name is Ryan and I'm a VFX artists from Cape Town, South Africa. I currently work as a VFX artist for an international studio where I do VFX work for mostly TV and online commercials. I specialize in 3D tracking, compositing, as well as general 3D. Camera tracking is one of the most exciting areas of the visual effects pipeline, and it's also the basis for most of the effects shots. We have a moving camera. The purpose of camera tracking is to create a virtual camera that matches the movement of the real-world camera exactly. This will allow you to place any 3D object or 3D characters seamlessly into your real-world scene. During this course, you will learn best practices when shooting your footage. How to create an image sequence from the original footage or plate. How to import that image sequence into Blender. You will learn all about the camera and lens settings. How to configure different tracker parameters, such as pattern size and search size. You will also learn about the different motion models at Blender offers. Then you will learn how to trackers and track different features in your scene. You will learn how to solve the camera track and also how to refine your track to get better results. You will also learn how to orient the scene correctly. And finally, we'll add test objects to the scene to confirm that our track is good. I really hope that you will learn a lot during this course and I look forward to seeing you in the first lesson. 2. Lesson 01: Shooting The Footage: So you've decided to shoot a scene where you will require some camera tracking. Your are a few tips for shooting your footage so that the tracking process will go smoothly and without any issues, make sure you set your camera's ISO or ISO to a very low value so that you don't have too much noise in your footage. Having too much camera noise can cause the trackers do not stick to the features you are trying to track. Add more lights to your scene if possible, so that you can shoot with a low ISO. One of the most important tips is to shoot with a high shutter speed. A high shutter speed means less motion blur. Motion blur is your number one enemy when it comes to camera tracking, because features will be really hard to track if they are blurry. You can always add motion blur back into your shot during the compositing stages. Depth of field. Try and shoot with a wide depth of field, meaning that most of the shot is in focus. It's okay if the background is slightly out of focus, but always have the main area that you will be tracking in-focus. Shoot at the highest betrayed, your camera is capable of a higher bit rate, means more information in each pixel and more information or detail will always be easier to track. Try and avoid any fast camera motion as much as possible. If you really need to perform some false camera movement, increase the shutter speed even more so that you limit the amount of motion blur as much as possible. Always review your footage before leaving the set. And that's all you need to take into consideration when shooting your footage. Get the best possible footage you can, which will make your tracking process a lot easier. If you can have a VFX supervisor onset that can communicate these points to your director of photography. Have fun shooting your footage, and I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Lesson 02: Create Image Sequence: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to convert the video to an image sequence because it's always better to use an image sequence when doing any types of VFX work like 3D tracking. So we're going to import our video file, like an MOV file that came from our camera. And then we're going to convert that to a PNG image sequence. So you can do that right inside of Blender. So as you can see, I've got blender open. So all you have to do is click on this little plus right here at the top and go to video editing and then select the video editing from the drop-down right here. Now this will take us to the video sequence. Now we can load our video file into this sequence. So all you need to do is click on Add right here and then go to movie. And then you can browse to your MOV file or that any type of movie file that you want to import. So I'm just going to select my MOV file. And then you're on the right hand side. You can specify some of the parameters are some of the settings. So the only thing that I want to uncheck Kia is sound because we don't need any sound for this clip so you can untick that. And then also make sure that you have this huge movie frame rate selected because that will just match the frame rate of your video file. Once you've done that, click on Add Movie to strip, and that will just import your video file. Now as you can see, if I scrub through this, I can see the video playing. And it also gives you like a time indication. So I only want to export 10 s of this clip. I don't want to export the full 12 s. So I'm going to set my start and end frame here at the bottom to one and my in-frame to 250. So that means it's only going to export the first 250 frames. And because my video is set to 25 frames per second, that means it will only export a 10-second clip. So very importantly, before we export our image sequence, Let's just go to the Render Settings right here at the top, and then scroll all the way down to color management, expand color management, and then make sure that your view transform is set to standard. By default, sometimes this will come in as formic and as you can see, if it's on, if it's set on Full make, your image will look a little washed out or it won't be run. Look right, so just make sure this is set to standard. You can see that the contrast is looking perfect. And then we can go to the second one, which is our output properties. This little icon here on the side. This is where you can specify where you want to export your image sequence to. First of all, make sure that your frame range is correct. So my frame start is set to frame one and the inner city to 50 because I want to export only those 250 frames. And then we're going to specify an output folder where you want to save this image sequence. So just click on this little icon here, and then we can browse to a folder where we want to set what we want to export that image, sequence two. So I'm going to give it a name, I'm just going to call it. Let's just call it clip and then just place an underscore because that will just separate the frame numbers from the filename. I use. I like to use an underscore after the file name. Then click on Accept. And a few things you want to change. You make sure that your color is set to RGB because we're not exporting any alpha or transparency in our shot. And then secondly, set the compression to zero because you want to make sure that you export these images at the highest quality possible, alright, and that's all you need to set here. Then once you are ready to render your image sequence, simply go to render and then render animation. Or you can also use the shortcut if you're on a Mac Command F 12, and that will start the image sequence rendering. As you can see, this is now running through all those frames. It's quite quick. And this will export all those frames as an image sequence. So I'm just going to let this run through quickly. Alright, so once that's done, you can see it's currently on frame 250, which is the last frame. Then you can just press Escape and that will go back into Blender. Now you can just, you can either close this project or you can just create a new one because we don't need that image sequence project anymore. So once you've exported your club, you can just close down that Blender project. You don't have to save it. Then if you browse to the folder where you've exported your image sequence, you will see all the frames export as a PNG. You can see it's starting at frame 10001 and it ends at 0250. Now you can look at them, you can just preview them to make sure they are looking good. And you can just go through and see all those frames in your video clip. So that's how easy it is to convert your video file to image sequence. And now everything is ready for us to start the camera tracking process. So I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Lesson 03: Import Image Sequence: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to import the image sequence that we just created back into Blender so that we can start the tracking process. So to do that, we need to go to the motion tracking workspace. So you can click on this little plus here at the top, go to VFX and then select motion tracking. And this is going to bring up the motion tracking workspace for you. Now you're in the middle or the center area. We can load in our image sequence. So simply click on Open and then browse to the folder where you've exported that image, sequence two. Now press a on the keyboard to select all those image frames are all the frames. And then simply click on Open Clip. And that's going to load it into this viewer area. You can adjust the size and you can also zoom out slightly to kinda see the whole clip. As you can see, this looks a little bit washed out. And that's because it brings it in as full mic and not standard. So let's just change our color space. So go to the Render Settings here on the side, scroll all the way down to color management, expand that. Then where it says view drones form. This will come in on by default as formic, which is wrong, we want to change this to standard. And I can see the contrast and everything is looking right, and that's all you need to do right here. Now, when loading an image sequence, there is no frame rate attached to that image sequence anymore because a MOV or a movie file will actually have a frame rate. But once you're working with an image sequence, you don't need to really worry about the frame rate unless you want a specific frame rate when rendering a video file from Blender. So if you go to your output properties here on the side, you can set the frame rate here by default, this will probably come in at 24 frames per second. You can set it to 25 or 30, and that will only change the playback speed inside of Blender. It's not going to really affect your rendering because once we have done all the tracking and you're rendering from Blender, you're going to render another image sequence. So the frame rate doesn't really matter that much when working with image sequences. But for now I'm going to set mine to 25. And that's all really that we need to change for this. So go ahead and save your project, and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Lesson 04: Camera and Lens Setting: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to just quickly look at our camera and lens settings before we start the tracking process. Still in motion tracking workspace, you are on the side. You'll see this side menu. Now, if you don't see it, you can simply press N on the keyboard. And that's going to bring up this side menu. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to the track tab here on the side. And then under objects, make sure this is set to camera because we want to track our camera. And then if you go down to the camera settings, just expand that. And this is where you will find the sensor size of your camera and also the focal length of the lens that you used in millimeters. So you can go and you can Google the type of model camera that you're using. And then you can find out the sensor worth that you can put in here. But there's also some presets that you can use. If you click these little lines, this will come up with a list of camera presets. And as I said, if you don't see your camera, you just Google it and you will find the image or the sensor with that, you can just manually plays into this area right here. Because I have a Blackmagic Pocket fork, a camera, it's on the list, so I'm simply going to select the Blackmagic Pocket for k from here. And then you can see at all actually automatically change my sensor size. So let's set it to 18.960, which is a sensor size for that specific camera. And then I'll also know that the lens I used was a 12 millimeter focal length. So I'm going to just enter 12 millimeter right here. Now, if you don't know the exact focal length of the lens that you used, you can kinda guess that if you know that you used a wide angle, maybe use anything from 12 to maybe 20 or 24. If it's more zoomed in, you'll probably use a 35-millimeter, but yeah, just figure out what focal length or a focal length that's close to the focal length or the lens that was used when capture, capturing the footage. So once you've said that, then we can go over to the left-hand side. And this is basically where we're just going to set our scene frames. And we can also prefetch or load all those image sequence frames into memory. So first of all, you're on the left-hand side under track, the track tab, you can simply click Set seen frames. And because we've already set it to 250, that's not really going to change. But if your clip or image sequence is longer than the frame range, that will just kinda adjusted automatically. It will set the in and out point for that image sequence. And then secondly, I'm going to click on this pre-fetch button, and that's going to load all these frames into memory. Can see it's loading year. And if we give it a few seconds, this will all be loaded into memory and playback will be nice and smooth. Alright, so once that's run through, I can press Space to preview the clip. As you can see, it's not really loading, it's kind of just playing it back smoothly and that's what you want. So now we are ready to start the tracking process. So I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 05: Tracker Settings: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at the tracking settings before we actually start adding tracking markers to our scene. So you're on the left-hand side, you'll see that we've got a section called Tracking Settings. And you've got things like the pattern size, the search size, the motion model match, and things like that. So let's quickly run through them and see what they actually do. So first of all, is the pattern size, that will be the actual pattern that blenders going to try and match from frame to frame. The search size is the area around the pattern size, how far the tracker will try and search to match that pattern. So if you have fast-moving camera motion, then it's always a good idea to increase the search size so that area where Blender will search will be a little bit bigger. Then below that you've got the motion model. And these are different algorithms, what Blender will use to try and track that feature. So you've got things like location, location and rotation, location and scale, and then also location, rotation and scale. So that will try and match that pattern even if it's rotating or scaling. And then a fine, I think that's how you pronounce it. That will also add a skew factor. So sometimes when a feature is rotating, but it's also skewing, then a fin might actually work better. Then lastly, we've got perspective and that will take perspective movement into consideration as well. Now it's always a good idea to die and can kinda try some of these and see which ones work best for your specific track or specific tracking marker. And you can jump between these in the same shot. So you can have different trackers that only maybe using location. And then you have a few trackers that will maybe use perspective or location and scale. So it all depends, you can change it all the time. Then below that we've got match, and this will give you two options, keyframe and previous frame. Now key-frame means it's going to try and match your pattern to the first key frame where you've set wave created your tracking marker. So it's going to try and match all the frames to that first keyframe. Then the second option is previous frame, and that means that the pattern will be matched to the previous frame and not to that initial keyframe. I find that previous frame usually works better than keyframe because it's going to try and match it to just the previous frame. So let's change this now to previous frame. For the motion model. I'm going to leave this on location for now, but we can experiment with these and see which one works the best. Now below that, we've got normalized as well. Now, normalize is only needed when the lighting inside of your scene changes. Now, if I scrub through this shot, you'll see that the lighting is very consistent. There's no change in lighting really. So we don't really have to enable Normalize. This is only if you have maybe flashing lights in your scene or you have maybe something that's causing a shadow to appear over your shot. So that will just kinda help to normalize the lighting inside of your scene. For this type of shot. We don't need to enable that. And that's basically all you have to know about the tracking settings. And in the next lesson, we will start tracking the features in the shot. So go ahead and save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 7. Lesson 06: Adding Trackers: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start adding trekkers to our scene and we're going to track those features and see how they track. So something to keep in mind that's very important, is that you need at least eight trackers that overlaps at any given point in the shot. So we need a trackers minimum, but they have to overlap all the other tracking markers. Don't worry if that doesn't make too much sense. Now, you will see as we continue through this lesson. So what we need to do is we need to try and create our first tracker. And I'm just gonna kinda zoom in here and look around for any high contrast points that we want to track. Also something to keep in mind is the area or the plane that you want to track in your scene. So for this scene, I wanted track the ground plane because I want to add some 3D objects into the scene that's on top of this floor plane. If you have maybe a wall year that you want to track, you can track points on that wall if you maybe want to add an object to that wall. But for this example, I just want to track the camera motion and to have the floor area tract as well. So I can add objects on top of that. So for the default pattern size to anyone and search size 71, I'm going to leave that as default for now. We can always change that for every single tracking marker. So let's start with all the default settings. The only thing that I want you to change is the match. Change that from key-frame to previous frame. As I just find that usually works a lot better because it's going to try and match the pattern to the previous frame. So make sure you're on frame number one. So just set your frame yet bottom to frame one. And now we're going to zoom in here and look for something that's nice and high contrast. Now I see this little rockier than I want to track. It's got some nice contrast. And to place a tracker you can hold in control on the keyboard and simply click to add a tracker. Now you're on the right hand side, you get a little preview. If you don't see the preview, you can just expand this track section here at the top under the track tab. And this will give you a preview when we are tracking forward. Now, once you've set your tracking marker, you can either use the tracking buttons here on the left-hand side under track you'll see you've got all these tracking buttons. Or you can use the tracking buttons here below, just above the sequence. Or you can use the shortcuts on the keyboard that I will get to shortly. So we want to track this feature forward me, meaning we're going to track forward up until frame 250. So with this track is selected, I'm simply going to click this button that says track the selected Marcus forward for the entire clip. You can also use the tracking buttons here. On this side, there's the same button there. And you can also see the shortcut, which is Command T or control T. Let's go ahead now and press this track forward button and see what happens. So you can now see we've got this little graph here at the bottom, and we'll get to that later. What that actually means. But what I want you to do is just kinda scrub through your footage. And you can also keep an eye on this little preview box see on the right-hand side. And you can see that our track is sticking to that rock pretty well. You can also play it back by hitting space and then keeping an eye on this preview window to see that our track is actually sticking to that rock. So this looks like a really good track. So save your project. I usually save off to each successful track just to be safe. You can also track multiple trackers at the same time. But I usually prefer to do them one-by-one so that I have full control over all the trekkers and to make sure that each tracker is as good as it can be. So make sure you're on frame one again and we're going to now add our second track. So let's kinda zoom around here and look for another high contrast point. Maybe this little mark right here looks good to me. So on frame one, I'm going to hold Control, click to add a tracking marker. And then we're going to press the shortcut Control T to track forward. Alright, so let's quickly scrub through this and keep an eye on this little window to see if we have a good track. So you can see it's kinda getting bigger, which means it's scaling it. And it's not looking too bad. But I actually want to try and change the motion model for this one to include this scale as well. So let's see if we can get maybe something a little bit up. I'm gonna go back to the first frame and I'm going to delete this tracker. So with this track is selected, press X and delete track. So now I'm going to change the motion model from location two. Let's try location and scale. Alright, so I'm going to zoom in here again. All then Control, click to place the tracking marker. And I'm going to press Control T to track forward. So that looks a little bit better to me if I scrub through here and keeping an eye on this little window, you can see that the track is actually sticking to that rock quite well. Alright, so I'm happy with that track. I'm going to save and just something yet the top, I'm just gonna kinda zoom in here to show you the trekkers in this little tracking window. So you can see we've got two trackers and they go all the way from the first frame, all the way to the last frame, frame 250. So basically we need eight of these trackers. But if we have trackers that only covers a certain area, then we might need a bit more than eight so that they overlap. But we need a minimum of eight tracks that over labs the whole range basically. So let's try and find more areas to track. But it's also good practice to try and track markers that's closer to the camera and also markers that are further away from the camera. So let's try and track something that's a little bit closer. So maybe this cross-section year is a good feature to try and track. So I'm going to zoom in, make sure you're on frame number one. And I'm going to hold Control, click to add a tracking marker. I'm going to track forward by pressing Control T. Alright, so you can see this one actually goes off frame. So this is a very good example. If I scrub through and keeping an eye on this little window, you can see it's tracking really well. And in some way it's going to try and, OR it's going off screen. So it's going to just mess up there and it's not going to be able to keep that track. So I'm going to scrub forward and just go to the last good frame. You can also use the arrow keys on the keyboard to go frame by frame. And I think that is kinda the last good frame for this tracker. Now we want to clear or remove any data to the right of this tracker. Going forward, we want to tell blender That's the last frame of for the specific tracker. So to clear this tracker forward, you'll see that we have this clear option under the track, and you've got two buttons, clear before and clear after. You can also use the buttons here just above the timeline as well. So I'm going to click the one with the arrow pointing forward. And if I click that, you'll see that it's basically just going to stop there. And if I go frame forward, it's not going to try and track any further. So that means that tracker only runs to frame 106. So if we look in this top little window, you'll see that that tracker, track number 002 is only going to track up to that frame. And that's good because we cannot ended it there and we told blender that that is the last frame for that specific tracker. So let's zoom out and let's see what else we can track in the shot. So I'm gonna go back to the first frame and I'm going to zoom in here and look for something that we can track, maybe this rock right here. So I'm going to hold Control. Click to add a tracking marker. And I'm going to press Control T to track forward. So that looks pretty good. I'm going to scrub through keeping an eye on this window to see if it's sticking to that rock and that's looking pretty good. Now, if you have any issues with the camera's moving quite fast, you want to increase this search size. By default it's on 71, but you can increase it to maybe 150, maybe 200 if you have really fast moving camera. But yeah, for this type of shot where the motion is quite nice and slow, 71 kind of works well for now. But you can also adjust it for each tracker. So that's just something that you can change all the time. So back on frame one, I'm going to try and track this rock right here. So control, click to add the tracking marker and then Control T to track forward. And that was a good one. I'm just going to scrub through here and have a look at it. And you can see that as sticking really well. If I'm looking, if you're looking at this little top preview window right here. So let's see how we can track backwards. You don't always have to track forward. So I can go to the last frame, frame 250. And now we can track backwards. So on frame to 50, I'm going to look for something to track, maybe this high contrast point right here. So for this one, I want to increase the pattern size slightly because I know that feature is going to move backwards and it's going to become smaller and smaller. So I want to just increase the size of that pattern slightly bigger so that blender can track it a little bit easier. So by default the pattern size is set to 21, so I'm going to maybe double that to around 40. Let's see how that works. So I'm zooming in here and I'm going to place my tracking marker, Let's say on that high contrast spot right there. And now we want to track. Backwards. So you can either use the track backwards button, which says track the selected marker backwards for the entire clip. Or you can use the shortcut Shift Control T. Shift Control T, and that's going to track backwards. Now let's see how that works. I'm going to go back to frame 250, keeping an eye on this preview track, kinda just scrubbing backwards and you can see it's kinda losing a little bit of focus there because it's becoming so small. But it's kinda working. But I think we might need to increase the tracker or the pattern size even more. I'm gonna go back to that frame and just delete this tracker. And I'm going to increase the pattern size. Let's try maybe 16. We can also increase the search size to maybe around 100. Let's see what we get. I'm going to place my tracker right there and track backwards Shift Control T. And let's see what we get. So if I just scrub through here, you can see it's sticking and in some way that's going to lose it. You can see, you can see some funny lines going on here and you can actually see that it's losing the track completely there. I want to just clear the track. Once it's losing that, that points, I'm going to use my arrow keys, go to the last good frame. And now I want to clear anything before. So this time we're going to use the clear before button to remove all the data going this way. So now we have a good track for that one as well. So just remember that you can either trek forward or you can track backwards. So let's go back to the first frame and let's look for some other things we can track in the shot. So maybe this edge of this little area right here is a good thing to track. So I'm going to do Control click. And then we're going to track forward control T. And let's see what happens. You can see it almost finished the whole shot, but it didn't quite get there. So if I just scrub through this, you'll see that it's kind of working but not great. You can see it's kinda jumping around this slightly. So I'm gonna delete that track and try something else. Let's try and track this rock right here. But for this one, I'm going to decrease the pattern size again, maybe let's set this to about 40 search size. We can leave on 100, and I'm just going to place a tracking marker right on that rock. And let's track forward control T. And it's scrubbed through, keeping an eye on the top corner to see if that rock is being tracked and yeah, it's looking pretty good. You can see that there's some gross elements that's actually appearing in front of the rock, but it's still tracking and that track is looking pretty good. So let's go back to the first frame. Let's save our project and let's look at the amount of trackers that we have in our scene. So we've currently got a total of seven, but only 12345 of those seven covers this shot entirely. So we need a few more extra trackers. So let's zoom out here and let's see what we can track. Maybe let's look at something at the back again. Maybe this rock right here. For this one, I'm going to decrease the button size even more. Because if I place my tracker, you can see the tracking area is quite big. And we really just want to track that those few dark pixels in the center. So I'm going to delete that and I'm going to maybe decrease the pattern size to around 20 and then place a new track. And I can see it's a lot smaller, that's kinda more focused on that rock. And let's try and track forward control T. Okay, so now if we scrub through this and keep an eye on this little window, you can see that it's sticking pretty well to that rock. Alright, we need a few more. So let's have a look around and see what else we can track. Now, remember, do not try and track anything that's moving like a branch in a tree. Or just really any trees don't try and track trees because they kinda move in the wind. So just try and avoid anything that's moving. So I'm going to zoom in and look for anything else that we can track, maybe this rock right here. So I'm going to place a tracking mark right there and track forward control T. And that one didn't stick to, well, you can see it actually moved off that rock slightly. So I'm gonna delete that track and try something else. So for this one, I want to change the motion model. Currently we are on location and scale, but I want to change this one to location, rotation and scale. Let's see how that works. I'm going to place my track on the rock again. And Control T to track forward. And you can see that one also didn't work at kinda jumped off that rock for some reason nothing gets because of the background that's changing quite a bit. You can see the background behind that rock is changing because of all the grass. So I'm gonna delete that and maybe look for something else. Back to the first frame. And maybe let's track this rock right here, this small little pebble and it's got some cracks and stuff there as well that might work. So I'm going to place my tracker right here, Control T. And we tracking forward and something. You can actually see that goes off frame again. So if I scrub through here, you can see it's sticking to the rock. And in some way that's gonna go off screen. So that's fine. So we can use it up to the last good frame, which is probably around here. And then we just go to the clear buttons and we clear forward. Alright, so that's also a good track. So now we have 123456 trackers that's covering the entire shot. And then we've got three trackers that's kinda halfway through. We need a few more. Let's go back to the first frame. Maybe let's see what else we can track. I'm just going to make this section of its smaller. Alright, let's maybe see if we can track that patch of grass right here. I just want to see if it goes out of frame. Yeah, it does. So I don't really want to track that. I want to track something that's going to stay in frame. Maybe this area here at the back, we can maybe track that. So let's go to the last frame to 50. Let's place a tracking mark right here. And this time I'm going to track backwards again. So Shift Control T. And let's see what we get. I'm going to scrub through keeping an eye on our tracking pattern here at the top. And you can see it's jumping around a bit. So I'm gonna go back to the end of the clip, delete that keyframe, make some changes. So I'm gonna go to the motion model. And I think for this one, just a normal location should be fine because that rock should actually just be moving left to right and up and down. So I'm going to zoom in your place my tracking marker, and then track backwards Shift Control T. Let's scrub through keeping an eye on our pattern. And you can see that it looks a lot better. It's kinda moving around. So maybe we can even get it a bit better. So let's see what we can do. I'm going to delete it again. And this time I'm going to increase the pattern size to around 30. Maybe. Location is still fine. And I'm going to place my tracking mark or more to the center of that rock. So it's got almost the whole rock in. You can also make adjustments here to the pattern to kinda just cover the area that you want to track, something like that. And now you can see the preview. We can see the rock. And I'm going to track backwards Shift Control T. Alright, let's scrub through and see what we have. So that is looking pretty good. That's quite a small feature that's far in the background. That's why it's very pixelated. And it's kinda moving around. But I think that is good enough. I think let's try and add one more good track and then we should be good to move on to the next lesson. So let's see, we've got 1234567 tracks that's all the way through, and then a few others that's not all the way through the club. So let's see what we can do. Maybe we can track one of these houses in the distance. Actually just want to track something that's on the same plane as the floor. So you can go and you can kinda track maybe the edge or the point of this roof, track forward. And that will give you some extra data because that's a really easy track. You can see it's sticking really well. So yeah, we can definitely do that. We're not going to use that tracker to calculate the flow area, but that will help with the actual overall track. So maybe let's track one more thing in the background and then we try and find a different pattern or a different thing that's on the actual floor plan. So maybe let's move in here and maybe let's track this satellite dish. So I'm just going to click there and then track forward. And you can see that's also a very easy track, sticking really well. Alright, so now we just need one more tracker that's on the floor. And maybe let's have a look what we have. Maybe let's try and track this area right here. So I'm going to place my tracker olden control, click and drag forward control T. And let's see what we get. As you can see that as a good track, it's actually coming quite close to the camera, which is nice. And if I'm looking at the little preview, you can see that it's sticking to that track pretty well. Let's quickly have a look at the amount of trackers. We have 123, 456-789-1011 that covers the whole shot and then three or so that kinda covers only a certain amount of frames. I think we should be good to go and move on to the next section. So save your project now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 8. Lesson 07: Solving The Camera Track: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to try and solve our camera track. So once you're happy with all your trackers, you can simply click on the Solve tab on the left-hand side to solve the camera track. Now, there are quite a few settings here that we can change and try and refine. But I always try and solve the camera motion first before I try and change any of these parameters. So let's see what happens when we click Solve camera motion. So click on that and it's going to run through the process and it's gonna give you a solve error. Now you can see at the top we've got to solve error. The solve error is 1.54 pixels. And that's actually a really, really good solve error. You want to get as close to one as possible. But if you can get below one, that's even better. A solve error that's much bigger than one will cause some issues when you add objects into your scene and they will kind of slide around. So a solve error of 1.54 is really good. But if you can get it below one, that's even better. So let's see how we can maybe refine this and get it a little bit closer to one. So the first thing that you can do is take this keyframe box that will just try and automatically add two keyframes because by default it's going to use frame 1.30 as the two keyframes. And that's where it's going to try and we'll try and figure out how the camera is actually moving in the scene. But if you tick this box keyframe is going to try and automatically determine which two keyframes are the best tool to use. So now I'm simply going to click on Solve camera motion again and see if we get a salt error that's a little bit less. Now you can see we get a salt error of 1.5, which is slightly less than the error we add before, but it's not really great. What's not that much better? So you can see it's now using keyframe a 42 and keyframe be 101. So what we can do is we can also try and guess or estimate the focal length of our shot a little better. Now remember, we have set these values manually offset my focal length to 12. Because I know that I actually used a lens that's got a focal length of 12, but sometimes that's not super accurate. So I'm just going to tick this box that says focal length. And I'm going to click Solve camera motion again. And let's give it some time. And now you can see we've got to solve error of 0.4, which is great. Now you can also see that a change, the focal length, 12-18, 0.92. So for some reason, blender thinks that a focal length of 18.92 is more accurate than what I've entered as 12. So let's go with that because I solve error is looking great. Now another thing that we can try and estimate is lens distortion. Because remember, every single lens will have some distortion either in the center or at the edges of your frame. So to do that, you can simply just tick this box that says a radial distortion. Now if you look at these values on the right-hand side under lens, you'll see there is a lens distortion section. And we've got these K1, K2, and K3 numbers. Now, if you've used Nick before, you can either set this to nuke and you can input these values for this specific lens if you have that. But if you don't have it, you can simply tick this box and then click on solve camera motion again. And that's going to try and guess those things for you. So now you can see we got a solve error of 243, which is horrible. So I'm simply going to undo that and see what we can do to fix that. So I'm going to try and maybe try and use two different keyframes here. So I'm going to set my first keyframe, maybe at around, maybe it around 100. And what you wanna do is you want to scrub through your footage and see where you have the most perspective change in your shot. And that's kinda the area that you want to use for these two keyframes. So I'm kinda just scrubbing through and maybe this area around here. So maybe from a T to around 180. So let's try that 8,080. And now I'm simply going to click on Solve camera motion again. Now you can see we get a solve error of 0.22, which is really amazing. You can also see that the lens distortion has got some values. You can see it's got some really small values. And that means it's trying to guess or trying to determine the lens distortion of the specific lens. And that's why we're getting a better solve error now. So a solver of 0.22 is really amazing. We can maybe bring that even lower. And in the next lesson, we will have a look at how we can refine and clean up our tracks even more to maybe get a better solve era than we currently have. Save your project now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 9. Lesson 08: Refining The Solve: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson we're going to look at how you can refine your track to get even a better solve era. So currently, as you can see, we've got to solve error. That's really, really good. That is sitting at 0.22. So I don't think we can get it any better than that. But let me show you if you are struggling to get that value down to a value that's close to one or below one. So the first thing that you can do is let's just pull this down so we can see all our trekkers year in this top left window. You can see all the tracking names here. And then next to these trackers, there is a value that is actually the Solve error for that specific tracker. So you can see it ranges from 0.020, 0.1 to 0.2, all the way to 0.5. And obviously the higher that number is, the worst is that tracker for that track is actually causing that solve era to go up. So you want to have trekkers with the lowest solve error next to them. So if you have a tracker that's maybe got a one or a five or something like that. You know, that track is really bad, so you want to delete it. So you can either just select that tracker in your list and then just press X and delete that track. And then you can simply just click on Solve camera motion again. But if I do that, I'll probably get a very high solve error. So that's really going to work for this specific example. But you can go through this and see if you have any trackers with a large error, remove it and then re-solve and see if that fixes your solver era. Another thing that you can do is you can also filter them by using some of these tools here. So under the salt tab you can go to clean up. You'll see there's a cleanup section here. And if I expand that, you'll have some options here. So click on clean tracks and that's going to bring up this little menu in the viewport. Just click on this to expand it. And here you can set the projection error. So if I click and drag this, you can see the further it goes up, the less trackers will be selected. If I'm holding Shift, I can do some fine adjustments. And if I slowly come down, you'll see at 0.5, it will select that one tracker. If I go a little bit smaller or lower this value, you will see that tracker will now also be selected like a threshold. So it's basically selecting all the trackers with a higher prediction error than that number. So you can see it's going to do on 0.3. So it's basically automatically selecting all the trackers with an error that's bigger than this number. So it's just an easy way to falter the tracks to see where the problematic trackers, or if I maybe bring this down to 0.3, I can see those two tracks on our selected. Now I can simply just press X and delete those two trackers and then you can resolve. But again, for this example, because I've got to track assault error, that's really, really good. 0.22, I'm not really going to get any better results. I'm not going to try and delete any trackers from the scene as just if you have any tracker issues or if you get a very high solve error, you can use this tool to remove those trackers from your scene. Another thing that you can do is if we expand this graph here at the bottom. Now, all these graphs are actually representing all of your trackers. And the truckers should kinda move throughout your scene in a very similar fashion. So you shouldn't see any of these squiggly lines or these graph lines that kinda jump out and follow a different direction. Sometimes not all trackers will follow the exact movement because the scene will track is further away from the camera and trackers closer to the camera will move slightly different. But sometimes you can see something that just jumps out at you like this one right here. And you can actually just click these lines to select those trackers in your scene. So let's have a look. So I'm just going to click here to de-select everything. And maybe this line, I can see this line is looking really strange. I can click on it. And that's going to tell me it's this tracker right here. So for some reason that tracker that something strange or it's not following the path of all the other trackers. This is also just an easy way to see which trackers or maybe causing issues. Again, in my example, it's not really causing an issue because I've got a good solid error. But if you see any lines that's kinda moving away from the others, simply just click on that line to find that tracker. And now we can simply just press, Delete and then re-solve the camera motion, and that might give you a better result. You can also see this line here. So I can maybe click on this line because it looks a little bit strange. And it will highlight that tracker for me in the shot. So it's this one right here. I can actually just scrub towards that area where it's kinda jumping around. Then I can simply just press X and delete that tracker and then re-solve. But again, as I said in this example, I'm going to keep all my trackers because I got some good results and undo that one as well. And then once you are happy with your Solve error, then we can move on to the next lesson. So just kinda go through all the trekkers and look at the graph. Look at the solve errors here at the top next to all the trackers, find the bad ones, delete them, and then resolve and try and get your solver error below one pixel once you get the Savior project. And then I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Lesson 09: Create Camera and Scene Orientation: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to create our scene and our camera. And then we're going to also orient our scene so it's aligned with our floor grid. So to do this, we're also going to go to our solving tab here on the left-hand side, and then scroll all the way down until you see scene setup. Then below that simply click on Set up tracking scene. And that's going to create a camera and all of the layers, et cetera, in the scene. So now we can jump back to the layout workspace just to kinda preview what we have. So you can see we've got our camera and we've got a light and a cube and also a floor. The default geometry. But if we look at the camera and I just press space, you can see that we actually have some camera movement. Now that camera movement is supposed to match your real camera movement Exactly. So if we look through the camera by clicking on the camera button or pressing zero on the keyboard. And we play this back. You'll see that we now have our image sequence as the background image. But you can see that the scene is not oriented correctly to our grid. You can see it's not matching. The plane is not sitting on the floor, so this is just not right. So what we wanna do is we want to orient our scene correctly. So there are few different ways to do this, but let me show you how I usually do it. So let's go back to the motion tracking workspace. And we have some options here to set the floor, the origin, and also the different axes. So first of all, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to choose a tracker that I want to be in the center of my scene. So I'm just going to select this one right here. So just a little tip when selecting trackers, just kinda click next to the tracker. Don't click on the tracker because you can actually accidentally move some of these points around. So just click next to the track is selected. I want to set that tracker as my center point. So to do that, simply click on Set Origin so that trekkers going to basically match the origin of our scene or the center point of our scene. So simply just click Set Origin. And now if we go back to Layout, will see something that looks a little bit different. Everything is warped and close to the camera. So it's not right, it just yet. So let's go back to motion tracking again. Now we want to tell blender what trackers that should use to create the floor plane or should align those trackers to the floor grid. So to do this, you need to select three trackers in your scene that's on the floor or on the plane that you are tracking. I'm going to select this one right here, holding shift, this one right here that we set as the origin. And you can choose any three good trackers that's on that plane. And maybe this one right here. So we've got that tracker, the Stryker, the striker, they're all on our floor plane. And I'm simply going to click on floor under the orientation section. So now if we go back to our layout, I'm just going to go out of the camera and I'm going to delete the light. And I'm also going to delete the cube and I'm just going to leave the plane. Now if we look through the camera again, you can see things are starting to look a bit better. Now if I play this back, you'll see that this plane object is kinda matching the movement a lot better. So I'm just going to scale this down because it's very close to the camera. And now you can actually move this plane around. Just don't move it up or down. Just move it on the X or the Y axes. So I can press G to slide it that way, or I can press G x and move it this way. But yeah, let's just kinda get it into the center of the scene so we can see if it's sticking and then press Space, and then we can see it's moving together with a scene, but it's not aligned to the grid. Lock correctly it. So what we wanna do is we want to show the tracking markers in our 3D view port. And to do that, simply click on this drop-down here at the top and then just tick this motion tracking box right here. And I can see that we have all these tracking points in the scene as well. And these tracking points are actually the tracking points that we have tracked in the motion tracking workspace. So if I click on one of these or if I select one of these trackers and go back to the layout, you'll see that it's actually going to select that tracker. If we look through the camera, you can also see the tracking markers all over where you actually track them. And if you scrub through, you'll see that they will stick to those points. So what I usually do is I go into a top view, click on this z axes to look at your scene from the top. And with the cameras selected, you can now rotate your whole scene. And you can see that it's going to rotate all those tracking points as well. And I usually try and align them slightly to the grid, just like soap because I can see my camera's pointing this way, some canal lining it right there. You can also move everything together. So kinda just press G and move it maybe somewhere around here. And now we're also wanna do is I want to look at this from the side. So press on one of these, either the X or the Y to look at this from the side. And then sometimes if you've seen this, maybe something like that. Just press rotate or R on the keyboard and just rotate this so that you've seen all the tracking markers that's on the floor is aligned to your grid. Now remember, you maybe have some tracking markers up at the top here. Maybe if you track like a building that was higher up, you might have some tracking markers that's higher up so you don't want to have need to align those as well. So just look at the tracking markers that's on the floor. So you can either select them like this and you can look through the camera. We can maybe select them like this to make sure these are all tracking markers that's supposed to be on the floor or something like that. We don't want to select those tracking markers that we tracked on the roofs of those houses in the background because they're not on the floor plane. Now with these tracking markers selected, Let's go back into a side view and make sure they are sitting on the floor. They're not all sitting on the floor exactly. You can see this one is slightly higher, but yeah, that that's fine. You just want to try and get them generally as close to the floor as possible by just rotating and moving the camera. Now, let's switch over to the y-axis and do the same. So this one, you will rotate sideways like this. Just kinda try and align those tracking markers so that are kinda just horizontally. Can move in here and just try and get it as close as you can. You can also move them up and down maybe to just average them out to get them as close as you can. All right, Let's look through our camera again. And I'm going to move this plane around maybe a little bit this way. So G and X, and you can also rotate this, so R and then Z, because we want to rotate this plane on the z-axis only an hour. We can maybe try and align it more to our scene. You just want to align it so it's looking good in the scene, if that makes any sense. So let's just place our plane right there. Another thing that you can do is you can also specify the size of your scene. So to do that, just select two tracking markers. So I'm going to click next to this tracking marker, Shift-click, select this tracking markers. I've got to tracking markers selected. And then under orientation you'll see the distance value that's by default is set to one. So what you wanna do is you want to estimate the distance in meters between these two tracking points in the real-world. So let's say this looks to me, it's about 43, 4 m apart in the real world. So I'm going to set this distance value to fall. So I'm telling blender that these two tracking markers off 4 m apart. And then I'm simply going to click on Set scale. And that will just set the scale of your scene to match better to the real-world scale. Alright, so now you've got your plane that's kinda aligned to your scene. If you look through the camera, now if I press Space to playback, you can see that our plane is now sticking nicely to the floor. And it's also following the camera moves. So that means we've got a good track and just play around with the orientation and see if you can align the floor grid to your scene as good as you possibly can. And once you are happy with this motion, we can move on to the next lesson, where we're going to add some test objects into the scene to see if they actually stick in real time. So save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Lesson 10: Adding Test Objects: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to add some test objects to our scene to see if they are actually matching the camera move and that they're sitting on the floor plane that we have tracked. So first of all, what I wanna do is I want to hide these tracking markers because we don't really need them right now because we've set the scene orientation and scale and everything is looking good. I'm going to click on this drop-down and just untick motion tracking so we don't see the strikers anymore. So we still have our floor plane that we can keep for now. And let's simply add some tests objects. So press Shift a mesh, and I usually like to use normal cones. So click on cone to bring in a cone object. And now we just need to place this cone on top of our plane. So I'm going to go out of the camera, maybe look at this from the side. And with our current selected, just press G Z, move it up so it's kinda sitting exactly on top of that floor plane, like so. Now go into your camera view. I will want to duplicate this cone, so we have a few that's kinda scattered around the scene. So for now let's hide our plane because we've matched the cone with our plane so we can hide that for now. So let's duplicate this cone. So I'm going to go Shift D and then press X or Y to only move around the x and y axes. And you don't want to move it up and down on the z-axis. You can also press G and then Shift Z to exclude the z-axis when you drag it around. So now it's only moving on the x and y axes. So maybe placed one here. Then let's duplicate this one as well. So Shift D and then Shift Z to exclude the z-axis. So we only moving around the x and y, maybe place one year and the back and maybe one more year on the side. So shift D, shift Z. And let's maybe move this one to maybe around the, alright, so now if I play this through, you can see that our cones are sticking in nicely to the floor. You can see they're not sliding around. But a better way to visualize this is to actually render out just a very simple render from the viewport itself. So let's do that quickly. So save your project. Now we're gonna go to our Output Settings. And you, it says Output. Just click on the Output folder. And we're just going to choose a folder where we are going to save this. And then you can also give it a name. I'm just going to call a test for now. Click Accept. And then below the output where it says file format. I'm gonna change this to FFmpeg video because I just want to render a quick MP4 file. And then under encoding, you can expand that, change the container to mpeg 44 MP4 file. Then you can set your video codec H.264. Medium quality is fine. And let's do a quick viewport render with all these settings set, you can go to View and then simply click on viewport, render animation. Alright, and this will basically just render out an MP4 using the viewport. So it's not really going to go and try and render anything. It's really just a very, very fast type of render. This will just give us a much better idea that our, if our track is working or not. So once the render is done, you can simply press Escape. Now if you browse to that folder, you can simply open the MP4 file and you can play that back. And now you can see in real time that your track is actually working pretty well. Alright, so once you are happy that your track is working well, you can save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Conclusion: Thank you for watching: And we've come to the end of this course. Congratulations for completing it. You now have the power to track a scene, to create a matching virtual camera so that you can place any 3D object or character into your scene. Thank you so much for enrolling in this course and I really hope that you learned a lot. Please reach out if you have any questions. And I'm looking forward to see what you can create. Have a great day, and I'll see you in the next VFX course. Goodbye.