What’s the best way to track a 3D object when the camera is locked down?
I watched a bunch of the Cineversity tutorials on camera and object tracking, but they all use a moving camera with good perspective shifts.
I have a truck in a test facility that’s on some sort of giant turntable that rotates it front of a static camera. I want to track graphic elements to some features on the truck.
The sequence is here (my source was for testing, somewhat compressed):
http://marshall-arts.net/Support/CascadiaFrontWind.zip
I used the Camera Calibrator to try to establish a Focal Length and basic orientation, and the result seemed close when I dropped in a 3D object.
I dropped some manual trackers on the wall, ran a manual track, then used the 3D solver in Nodal Pan mode with the focal length set to what the Camera Calibrator came up with (39.755). I’m guessing nodal pan is what I want in this situation.
The resulting Solved camera was pretty wonky, and adding planar and vector constraints didn’t seem to help getting it lined up to the “real world”. I thought a plane object aligned to the planar constraint would line up in perspective, but I couldn’t get it close to matching (whereas the Calibrated camera produces proper perspective on the walls).
Do the various constraints not work in Nodal solves? If not, is there any way to get the scene oriented somewhat correctly to the real world? In this case the camera should be low and looking up.
I went ahead and 2D tracked some features on the truck (roughly supervised), ran a 3D solve, and got some useable nulls in 3D I could attach my graphics to.
Any suggestions? I still can’t seem to get attachments to work, so here’s the scene file:
http://marshall-arts.net/Support/TruckSetup.c4d.zip
Thanks.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics