Camera Tracking Using the Game Engine

Published by Tim Formica [Room335] on April 23rd, 2008 in 3D News, Plugins, Tutorials

"It’s finally here. GameBlender - ARToolKit demo contains camera tracking in GameBlender’s virtual scene, as it is shown in Little man video. To get it working, you need to install Texture plug-in and PyARToolKit module. (I’ve sorted out some bugs in Texture plug-in, so I suggest to download actual version)."

Short about the project: They import a video stream into blender and use some scripts to real-time camera track the streamed content. Then they are able to move the camera in blender with their real camera. Take a look at it:

GameBlender - ARToolKit demo

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23 Responses to “Camera Tracking Using the Game Engine”

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1 LOL Apr 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 am

Bullshit.
2 Stephen Danic Apr 23rd, 2008 at 7:33 am

Really impressive!
3 Dread Knight Apr 23rd, 2008 at 7:34 am

Haha so cool!
4 Murphy Randle Apr 23rd, 2008 at 7:50 am

wow
5 3sie 3wiel Apr 23rd, 2008 at 8:29 am

Uh… video anyone? Seems to have gone missing?

@LOL. Any particular reason for your choice of word?
6 Roger Apr 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am

realtime? wow

is it also a precise method for the non-realtime exact need for camera tracking?
7 Roger Apr 23rd, 2008 at 8:32 am

check out this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpZI1Z-k88Y even more impressive
8 blaize Apr 23rd, 2008 at 8:47 am

that's all great and all, but not really usefull for scenes that DONT have that piece of paper in there.
what we really need is camera tracking that just calculates positions based on camera angles and such.
something like this: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/Scene/
(and yeah.. this is realtime also)
9 Tesla Apr 23rd, 2008 at 8:59 am

Thats impressive, so its all realtime and there's even phyisics based on what the cam sees? That's a feature i'd like to try out myself
10 AD-Edge Apr 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 am

Wow, thats pretty sweet! It would be interesting to see some applications for this, never seen anything like it.

Tesla- i dont think the physics (ie the balls falling off the table) are based on what it 'sees' in realtime, that would be really advanced.

And its my first post here on Blendernation to. Bout time… :)
11 aws357 Apr 23rd, 2008 at 9:25 am

Mmmmh. Does it work with the built-in iSight from most moderns mac?

If yes, that's definitely something I would like to have a look at…
12 Olaf Apr 23rd, 2008 at 11:03 am

Brilliant!

But what if I wanted it the other way around: integrate Blender generated movie sets and props with green-screen shot actors? How would I do this? I can't wait to produce my own Star Wars-like movie using Blender.
13 Roger Apr 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 am

aws357, yes it works with a mac and her webcam. well, at least this works: http://www.hitlabnz.org/wiki/Black_Magic_Book it's another use of the ARToolKit 'engine' and one that works just by downloading the setup, printing the three included patterns and starting the app. now ye see a ship, a logo and an animated ship-race-course in 3D on your screen.

I couldn't get the blender app to work, ye need all these really difficult and technical application to get it to work (maybe I'm just a noob and fool) but I couldn't get it to work
14 LOGAN Apr 23rd, 2008 at 4:04 pm

Nice to try. Some one willing to make a complete package to download with needed installs?
15 boat Apr 23rd, 2008 at 10:44 pm

i guess no one can get it to work.???????????
any one? do i have to install Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003?
16 Glenn Apr 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm

Has anyone got this working yet? I find the install help a little cryptic. I have made a PYTHONPATH variable pointing to the PyARTK files, installed the latest BlendVideoTex scripts into blender but cannot make sense of the demo. Is there a painfully slow step by step for numb-skulls like me to help me get going?

Glenn
17 SNovak Apr 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 pm

Awesome!!
18 Roger Apr 24th, 2008 at 11:55 am

it sucks that i can't get it to work, if someone can make the suggested complete package, that would be wild

until then, this is what i've made just now using the ARToolKit's 'engine'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmWRokiwux4

hope to be able to do the same thing, but then with materials (maybe even textures) and using the blender game engine

cheers
19 NathanKP Apr 24th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

I don't know about you, but I didn't find the camera tracking in the sample video to be particular impressive.

NathanKP - Inkweaver Review
20 solhex Apr 24th, 2008 at 6:33 pm

Yeah I agree about the quality of the camera tracking, although that said it's not that bad, there was a fractional lag through the faster moving images but it soon caught up. When Icarus or pftrack start to go off track that's where they stay without human intervention.

The first example movie I saw ran for over a minute and looked like it didn't need to stop anytime soon. I got Icarus to successfully track 12 seconds of DV footage once. Also I think this was developed for more real time interactive kinda stuff. I'm amazed by it frankly, and free to boot! It might be a while before programs like Icarus and pf track can do pixel perfect "live" tracking but can you imagine how cool it would be to have near instantaneous cg and live action animatics for our future productions…well, that's what it looks like we have here. Awesome! For now though, like a few others I'll have to wait until someone smarter than myself makes an idiot proof installer…Anyone?
21 Ash Apr 25th, 2008 at 9:55 am

Hi, all,

thanks for compliments to this video, and for the critics, too. I apologise for problems you had with the demo, but I didn't meant it as complete "one-click" solution. It's purpose was to show possibilies of GameBlender Texture plug-in that I created and published. This plug-in currently works on Windows only (there are users trying to make it work on linux).

The best way to get working demo is install Texture plug-in first and test, that's it is working (there is demo for it on my site). Then you'll have to install remaining modules: numpy and PyARTK.

When you'll get into troubles, you can check discussion on http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=65107 - there is a lot of information on plug-in, or you can write a comment on my site with info of your specific error.
22 Gustavo Jun 19th, 2008 at 7:07 pm

where do i put the sources?
23 Gustavo Jun 19th, 2008 at 7:09 pm

where do i put the plug-in?