#3d tracking

[mohammad9099]

after effects 3d tracking

[jay5292]

[art-manali]

[perkins-buzo]

Technicolor is hiring!

[thephoblographer]

The Bravest Move They've Ever Made: Nikon z9 First Impressions

There's no shutter.

Nikon has been known to try crazy and brave things every now and again. Years ago, they made the Nikon 1 series and used Ashton Kutcher to promote it. It was in baseball stadiums all around, and it was beating Sony’s NEX lineup in many ways. The current iteration of the brand that’s responsible for releasing the Nikon z9 feels like the Nikon I’ve known over the years. They’re trying things, and I…

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[pavel-nosok]

Researchers show FingerTrak, a hand tracking wristband for AR/VR input

Researchers show FingerTrak, a hand tracking wristband for AR/VR input

Cornell’s SciFi Lab has revealed a wristband that uses thermal cameras and a deep neural network to determine the wearer’s hand and finger poses in 3D.Read More

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[nikonstudio]

DSLR Focus #2 - Focus Tracking & Accuracy!

The certainty of the intended subject point when your camera confirms focus - another key reason why DSLR still prefer to own over a mirrorless. As of 2020, Sony just about got there with their mirrorless AF, while folks like Olympus, Canon, Fujifilm and even Nikon Z (with the exception of their abandoned Nikon 1s) are still playing the catchup game in this department.

Nothing beats the joy of knowing for certain that all your focus point are diligently tracked accurately and quickly with each shot. Blurred or misfocused shots are what we want to minimise, having invested in any imaging tool.

And while we are at it, the 3D tracking capability of focused points in DSLR is still miles ahead of most mirrorless (save the Sony A9 series) camera today. Give it a go, and you would begin to agree too. A hybrid contrast/phase detect AF engine is the future.

So, if you already own a DSLR, keeping your focus mode to AF-C (3D/Group AF) will ensure that you are already optimized to benefit from the most reliable tracking engine for your moving subjects. Among some DSLRs, the total number of AF points can be toggled but I would simply leave it at the maximum available.

Never leave this on its default setting! Turn those knobs and optimize your cameras!

[artygalop]

Maya Live Link (3D Tracking)

The Maya Live Link plugin is a new plugin by Autodesk allowing for the transfer of cameras, lights and nulls from After Effects to Maya or vice versa.

(Mind you, I’m only testing out the workflow so if you want more accurate data/to spend more time in making sure the tracking data is perfect you can do that).

Free stock footage by yuveern

The Maya Live Link plugin is very easy to install. All you have to do is go to Adobe’s Exchange site and click install. (The plugin is automatically synced through your creative cloud app.) If the automatic install on Exchange doesn’t work, you can find the manual installation of Maya Live Link plugin here. In After Effects, we will first need to track our camera footage. In the Tracking panel, click track camera after selecting your footage inside of your composition.  (The higher the contrast with more detail in the footage, the better for solve. Many will use a color-corrected version of their footage just for tracking).

The composition will take a few minutes to analyze before it can solve the camera. These are the settings I ended up using. (Mainly just for more tracking points).

With the 3D Camera Tracker effect SELECTED in your Effects Controls, you then will see the tracking info. Hovering over your footage you’ll see a circle that will attempt to align to your ground. Once you find a spot you’ll need to right-click and select “Create Null and Camera.”

Next, in both After Effects and Maya open up the respective live link plugin.

With the plugin open in both programs, an automatic link should occur. 

To import the camera and the null object into Maya, just simply drag the camera in the null in After Effects into After Effect’s Live Link window.

The null and camera will now appear in Maya.

To line up the objects with the footage, I simply exported an image sequence of my footage and imported it into Maya as an image plane attached to the camera.

(Note at this point you can preview how accurate your tracking data was by scrubbing through your timeline in Maya).

(By default, image sequences start with a 1 in Maya. If your image sequences start with 1001 then goes to 1002, 1003, etc. just change the frame offset to 1000).

Since I like having my objects on the grid in Maya, I simply grouped the null and camera into a new group so I could adjust the Camera and Null’s transforms while keeping the keyframed data from After Effects.

It’s best to try to align the grid to your camera’s perspective.

Make sure your object is at your null! The null is effectively where your ground plane should be.

Don’t forget to make a shadow catcher that aligns with the objects in the footage your superimposed object in Maya would cast onto. For example, if your 3D object is on a real-life box, you’d want to model and align the box.

In Arnold, a shadow catcher material is called an aiShadowMatte.

If you’re using an HDRI in Arnold make sure to set the camera visibility to 0 so you have a transparent background:

Also, don’t forget to hide your image plane! I like to just set the display mode to none.

Making sure Maya is set to the same frame rate, resolution and time range as your footage and you’re rendering on a transparent backdrop: batch-render out an EXR image sequence. In the Arnold render view, you can switch the background to a checkerboard to make sure there’s nothing in the background. (I like to render out a test image and import it into After Effects before committing to a bath render).

After importing your image sequence into After Effects, make sure to right-click the sequence in the project window, click “interpret footage,” then click “main.”

In this window, you can change the framerate to match the framerate of your footage.