Motion tracking with Blender Tomato

richard-courtney wrote on 11/16/2011, 8:20 PM

While most may not need to add CG objects in your videos, this new release of Blender
fills a void with motion tracking.



Placing videos on a plane that is motion tracked to your background video will be an open
door to new projects.

Follow these steps to download a beta release of Blender:
1. Go to Graphicall.org
2. In the sidebar you will see various filters. Click the icon that matches your operating system.
3. If you know the version of your operating system (32 or 64 bit) click that as well.
4. The site should now display all builds that match your operating system.
Click on any of the builds to download them. There is no right or wrong version, just pick any.
5. Once unzipped, no install is necessary, just locate blender.exe and run it.
6. Enjoy!

For a tutorial on using Motion Tracking see:

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/07/14/gsoc-tomato-branch-camera-tracking/

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/16/2011, 8:42 PM
It's my opinion, but the Blender guys need to stop revamping stuff that works and stop adding new features and finish what's already in there. IE the particle system is still the same basic particle system from YEARS ago, but effort is being put in to motion tracking.
richard-courtney wrote on 11/16/2011, 9:32 PM
Particle systems are an area I have never really used. (except a feeble attempt at snow flakes for a Winter scene)
The user interface had a major facelift and the render engine is a lot better.
You will notice tracking area selection has similarities to Adobe AE.

My fascination with Virtual Sets has been hindered with the cost of pro level tools.
This new branch from Blender has my attention and thought others might be interested as well.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/17/2011, 8:26 AM
You can do motion tracking with any motion tracking app & Blender. Syntheyes is ~$400ish and there's another one (forget the name) that starts ~$100. If you buy AE (or any Adobe product) then motion tracking is easily in your budget (and all motion tracking programs are compatible with most compositors and 3D apps).

If Blender is being seriously considered for motion tracking then why not use it's compositor that's much more advanced then the motion tracker, has more options then Vegas, fully integrates with the 3D aspect of the program, etc. Heck, why bother with AE when you could use Blender and it's compositor & 3D capabilities, and it's NLE? It could be (in theory) the only app you'll need. No Vegas, AE, particle illusion, Syntheyes, etc. The reason: Blender goes off on a tangent in one area (IE NLE, motion tracking, particles/physics, etc) and then stops before it's finished. For 3D modeling and rendering it's great but everything else gets ~75% of the way then stops because a new bullet point is wanted.

I'm eagerly waiting for Doom 3 to go GPL because it's particle system is BETTER then Blender and it came out in 2004. Then I could make my own custom particles particles and have a fully GPU capable renderer at any resolution I want to uncompressed formats.