Camera tracking tutorial with Blender and Voodoo
Here is a great tutorial on how to do camera tracking in Blender, using the Voodoo camera tracker. The Voodoo software can estimates camera parameters, like position and rotation and reconstructs a 3d scene from image sequences.
At the tutorial, a virtual object is placed in real footage. Go check out the tutorial here. All credits for the tutorial goes for Sympodius, from the BlenderArtists forums.
There are not very many good tutorials about blender and camera tracking. Thanks!
cool i was surfing youtube after this and found this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQrp3tOPTfY
Blender was mentioned and voodoo the rest I can’t read since I am dutch.
“Incidentally, we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to convert our MPEG camera footage to the required series of Targa files”
blender can do that easy peasy in the sequence editor :D
RIGHT when I needed this. THANK YOU! Nice!
Very nice work. I am going to follow this tutorial over the weekend.
May I recommend Syntheyes for anyone doing any professional work in camera tracking.
It is $399 USD but after messing with Voodoo for weeks I tried Syntheyes and was sold instantly.
Syntheyes is used in many major films and comes highly recommended.
The new version allows exporting animated curves to rotomates and the blender exporter is great.
Check it out:
http://www.ssontech.com/
Here are some of the films it has been used on:
http://www.ssontech.com/seenon.htm
I should get paid for this :)
But really it is a joy to use and has so many features. I run it under Wine and all is well.
thanks for the recommendation ccherrett :)
and I think syntheyes has a free demo (and lots of tutorials) too (and its way above the beta release stage :P )
voodoo = college project – non commercial use
syntheyes = professional tool – extensively commercial
anyways, try both and see what suites you best :)
But isn’t there going to be a camera tracker in blender really soon?
Dolby – I hope you are right… no reason Blender can’t compete with commercial products as we all know…
Don’t forget the free Icarus software (not for commercial use):
http://www.peerlessproductions.com/tuts/pages/Icarus.html
It turned into a commercial product from Pixelfarm called PF-Hoe. This sells for only £49! The cheapest of the commercial options.
http://www.pfhoe.com/hoe.htm
Hey everybody, thanks for the supportive comments and for posting me on blender nation. What a thrill!
@amdbcg: Cheers for that info, I’ll look into that and see if I can replace Adobe Premiere CS3 with Blender in the tutorial.
hehe nice tutorial, much better than that other done by two guys about camera mapping in blender, you know the one where they argue and talk rubbish.
I also started with Voodoo, and switched to SynthEyes.
Syntheyes has also an exported for Blender,and works fine with it.
The tutorial is very explanatory. A fine start for beginners about the concept and the relevant things (Aspect ratio, pixels)
but for those who sympathize Syntheyes:
if you tweak the parameters of Voodoo, you can also get great results.
(I mean the tracking parameters, now follow the general rules for success)
If you ran the python-script exported by Voodoo you see a point-cloud, the voodoo-cam and an empty.
Tip of the day: move and rotate that empty really fine with your background image and blender-objects to match.
If your sequence is too long, it will slowly drift away in a direction, so compensate this by adding an ipo to that empty or track shorter sequences.
This post may (should) be deleted after my hints are adapted in the tutorial ;)
use mplayer for split the movie into raw images fast and stable solution
mplayer movie.avi -vo tga –nosound
I have updated the tutorial to work with Blender 2.46. I’ve also (based on suggestions here) removed the need to use Adobe Premiere 2.0 and the Python Image Processing. Everything is now done solely within Blender and Voodoo.
I hope this helps anyone that is having problems.
Hi Sympodius
Where can i find the Tutorial on Voodoo +blender
Best Regards
Dayal
Singapore