My last try with kentool geotracker in blender was a complete fail. It works basically like pftrack’s geotracker, so it was easy understand for me. However, refine buttons broke completely the track. I tested under differentes blender versions and examples. It was the beta and free version for blender. Maybe two or one year ago.
I see that there is an official and paid version. I guess it is more stable and reliable, right?
In my experience the refine can be tricky on a marginal track with Keentools. Not any different for the paid version.
I discussed it with them, and they know it’s a limitation, but don’t have a solution. I ended up working around it mostly by not using refine, but going into the animation editor and manually smoothing the curves with Nuke’s filter tool.
My issue was that I was tracking round bottles, and there aren’t always well defined edges that you can align with the footage. So you have a bit of an error, and then it starts drifting, and the refine doesn’t fix it, and before long you’re manually refining the track.
But I had good success in other cases. None of these tools is fool proof.
But the geo tracker, (as concept) is based in: a- track geometry, (it will fail) b-reposition the geo and refine (backward and/or forward), 3- repeat same after a few frames or continue appending a new analisys. In pftrack it works 100%. I can’t think how make a geotrack at first attempt without repositioning and refining or editing original tracking curves.
(Going a bit off-topic from the thread here)
Yes, you reposition the geo and refine. But the tracking curves actually look worse after the refine than before in the failure scenario. They don’t converge but the error is even bigger. Must be the way they go backwards and forward.
Could be because GeoTracker doesn’t actually track the pins, it only tracks a 3D transform matrix of the whole geo. Maybe PFTrack does something different?
There’s a post somewhere about it. I’ll see if I can find it.