Tutorial: Digital Costume Enhancement (Tracking, easy/complex)

you just made one of the space-monks join the corpus hehe

Go my little tracking minions! Dude WTF your too funny! Sitting here with a glass of red with one headphone in giggling like a kid, my wife’s like, what’s so funny? How the hell do I explain this one to her? 🤣😂🤣😂

Ian I'm wondering what might cause the track points not to show up in the viewport? I've got my tracking camera set as the scene camera, motion tracking turned on in the overlays, set to plain axis and maximum scale 5 but for the life of me I can't get them to appear! It's an object track like this tutorial, have you ever run into that?

VideoSlice

I just used this technique to motion track a helmet onto my greenscreen character footage! Saved myself a few hundred dollars trying to buy the replica helmet for the shoot and people can't even tell the difference! thank you!

VideoSlice

hey ian! you should do a tutorial on how to math your cg with real footage. I feel like its something I'm having a bit of trouble with and I think a lot of others do too

William Landgren

Congrats on the edit lock. I’m looking forward to seeing it! I just had to do a bunch of cast shadow passes at work and it really is a pain (I’m using a commercial application and not blender). Because the built in shadow catcher was kind of garbage we did the following: we force the normal of the shadow catching object to a constant value (usually pointing towards the light or straight up). That means wherever a light ray hits the object, regardless of the actual orientation of the surface to the light, the illumination calculation returns the same result. Where the light Ray doesn’t hit (because it is in shadow) it remains black. This really only works with a Sun light (lights with distance falloffs will cast “shadows” as the subject gets further away. It might work with environment lights but I haven’t really looked into it. Kind of hacky, but it is simple and got us through a crunch period! Love your videos!

Thanks Mark! It fits really well into the edit, too! I'm really glad- it was one of the weaker shots before :D

Ian Hubert

I don't want to be the guy that self promotes everywhere, but this could be relevant: https://youtu.be/lT0WMs--nb4

Ian Letarte

Oh, heheh I was just digging through my hard drive and found this: https://youtu.be/dX6qUQTQc8k Majorly inspired by your crab battle I believe.

Ian Letarte

I saw the final shot on instagram. The composited foreground glass with reflections REALLY sells this shot!

Mark Miller

Thanks for giving such an in-depth response! I might try it for a background character, but I have a feeling that as soon as they start turning and occluding stuff it'll become more trouble than its worth. I'll play around with it and let you know haha

Oh definitely where you can avoid 4K in editing saves so much time. For my film course, the final project has to be a full 4K 7 minute film shot in raw, which is such an extreme upgrade in my usual workflow. I'm mostly dreading the file size, my last big project was a school film and had 7 hours of footage from a DSLR and all of that was 100gb. Now 100gb is like 2 minutes of footage.

Harry Robins

yes this is very helpful thanks

oh this is excellent, hahaha AND YES IAN, me too. I swear so many introductions to different cg techniques are unnecessarily complex. Like- I get it. If you have plenty of pre-production and can set up a whole tracking rig and can get that .05 pixel error or whatever, it's great. But knowing you can just kinda track something on a whim if you need, and it isn't that big a deal is SO nice (honestly I got pumped making this video yesterday and I've tracked like 6 more things since then. It's madness).

Ian Hubert

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ae-to-blender-3d-34871595 It's not the best tutorial, but it goes through importing an AE track to blender with ae2blend (starting around 14 minutes in). I don't use that method much anymore, mostly just because doing a blender-native track gives you a much denser point cloud, which I've found really handy when it comes to reconstructing the geometry, and because being able to easily add object tracks to combine with the camera track is really straightforward :D I hope that helps??

Ian Hubert

how to tracking with ae2blend?

Oh man yeah! I'm going to be uploading a 4k version of the final episode just to keep everything crisp. I'm not at a point where I can do EVERYTHING 4k yet, since render times/bitrates/upload times all that takes exponentially longer, but I'm excited to get there :D.

Ian Hubert

Ooo-hrmmmm. okay so. IF you tracked, say, the torso, then had an IK solution to solve the arms to some tracked hands, that'd probably be relatively straightforward (although any time the hands were occluded, you'd have to do some hand tweaking), and the same with IK legs down to tracked feet. But in general I think you'd be signing yourself up for a pretty hard time :). Like, I'm sure you could do it for a test, but scaling it up for an entire animated character in a project would be pretty intense (I guess Marvel does it all the time for half of their characters, but they've got full-time match movers at a dozen VFX studios, I suspect). And if you wanted to get super intense and had one of those suits covered in tracking points, with a quick shutter speed, you could probably get each limb segment and all that, if you wanted- but you'd still have a bunch of individual object tracks that might not play together *all* that nicely. But if you give it a shot, I super want to see the results!!!

Ian Hubert

Very cool! Theoretically, how practical do you think it would be to fully animate a character like this, and just get rid of the original footage entirely? Like a fully visual mo-cap?

Another one!

Ian Letarte

hey ian

Ian

Even though you're halving the resolution, I think it would be good to upload a 4K file to YouTube for better compression because it allows higher bit rates, even if it's just media encoder scaling it up.

Harry Robins

This is great! I've been scared of 3d object tracking ever since the days when I saw the sticks with multicolored tennis balls all over them. I should give it another go.

Ian Letarte

I noticed you did the tracking on the .mov file instead of an image sequence, was that just for convenience? Would you advise using image sequences over video files?

Thanks Otari!! Yeah after 3 years, I can't believe it's this close, haha! Very glad to hear the tut was useful!

Ian Hubert

Man yeah kind of regretting NOT making a cake tutorial now, hahaha

Ian Hubert

Excellent!. I kinda half understood it with my tiny brain... and in the cape example I thought you said "Cake" ... now THAT would be a whole other awesome tutorial :) ;)

Doug Brown

I use AE quite a bit!! it's just usually the same stuff over and over (blend modes and mist passes, mostly. Maybe comping in a lens flare). I don't mention AE for kinda 2 years. 1.) I pay 60 bucks a month, and I feel like that's too expensive for most folks? But the big reason is 2.) cramming all of AE on one screen for a screencapture drives me nuts, hahaha. Maybe I could do a 4k screen capture, but trying to fit it all in is just too much. That said, yeah! I'll keep that in mind! I should touch on that more; AE's crazy powerful. I used to use the AE 3d tracker then import into blender, but blender's reconstruction tools work best if it's a native blender track, so I've ever stopped doing that.

Ian Hubert

Ahahaha, Celtx has been passed from drive to drive for like the past 10 years, and FadeIn was so sassy on twitter that 6 months ago I was like, "don't know how this translates me into using a piece of software, but yeah okay".

Ian Hubert

Yeah, that's a lot of what the tutorial covers (unfortunately the camera was locked, so we're only doing object tracks, but camera tracks work the exact same way, and I touch on how they combine :) )

Ian Hubert

Dude! Can't wait for episode release. Congrats on edit lock! Tut as always helpful, thanks man and have well deserved rest after release👍

Awesome! important question：blender track moving cameras and objects both？

Great video as always! Random question: I see you have both Celtx and FadeIn. Do you use both?

Zeke Faust

Good tips, tnx!

Hey Ian, do you usually use Blender for all the VFX work now? I really enjoyed the tuts you created using AE, especially because we don't see good tutorials between AE and Blender out there... Mostly Element 3D - AE or C4D - AE.

Leo Nobu

Ooo- what's Sound Flow?

Ian Hubert

Ahh! Congratulations on the lock! Fantastic video as always :D

Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey

Is it possible for blender to finish sound flow while rendering?

Can’t wait to see final edit. So inspired by this. Thank you so much!!!

Oh, totally!! Just did the tracking/rendering before the roto :D.

Ian Hubert

Great on the edit lock, Ian, but look at :15 of this video in the composited shot. Kaitlin's right arm is being cut off. :(

Fes

Thanks dude!!! Feels 50% amazing, 50% so tired of watching that same footage over and over hahahaha

Ian Hubert

About to watch. BUT CONGRATS ON EDIT LOCK!!!!!!!

Blake Rizzo