Hi guys and gals… Any ideas on how to track this beast? Need to insert a screen into the blue section.
I’m gonna have one more whirl with the Perspective grid and a whole lot of gmasks for the occlusions tomorrow. Any other thoughts?
https://bit.ly/3tVKD3T# - A001C049_231219_RNEF_V1-0027.mov - A001C049_231219_RNEF_V1-0027.mov
Looks a like a buckle up and mask out the occlusions job. Perspective Grid won’t like most of that wall with all the action in front of it. Mocha might handle the occlusions a bit better with less masking work. Camera tracking, maybe? Not a lot of environmental info there, though.
1 point track the best marker and hand animate the rotation and a few keyframes on the perspective surface should do the trick.
You’d likely spend more time masking occlusions then it would take you to hand track it.
Perhaps instead a big pGrid, do a multiple small gmasks attached to 1 parent axis to do the planar tracking on.
Two-point track for rotation and scale. I would track the upper left track point and upper right outer corner of the billboard with some manual adjustments while in the tracker module. Then perspective surface for final adjustments.
I do all my planar tracking in the Gmask Tracer because I like having the tracks in an Axis that I can invert by hitting the Invert button. So I’d start there. Draw little masks around the tracker marks and parent them all to a new axis. Planar track that axis a bit at a time, taking care to stop it and unparent masks on tracker points that get obscured and adding masks for markers that come into frame as you go.
You will have to roto or paint to get the markers out of the keyed fg, but that should work a treat.
Hijacking this thread… How about this shot then, I need to replace the bottle. I tried mono analyzer in action, gmask tracking with perspective… I see there is not really a way to do this track in Flame. I’m considering getting a license of KeenTools for Blender (and learning both packages) or diving into PFTrack… Any suggestions?
Yes to Blender/Keentools.
Just did something very similar on a bottle in Nuke/Keentools/C4D.
Are you replacing the whole bottle or just the label?
The Keentools folks have posted a lot of Blender tutorials in their YT channel, and there are a few others. I only scanned them as I’ve never learned Blender. They have older Nuke tutorials, several good ones from vfxexpert on YT.
The shot was a packshot of a rotating bottle on cyc, so nothing in the world to track the camera, just object tracking. I only had to remove an air bubble from the bottle in this case, not a major replacement. I created a 3D model in Cine4D and also UV unwrapped it there. Imported that into Nuke, tracked the 3D model onto the bottle with Keentools, setup camera projection (in Nuke the scanline render node has a UV mode), which gives you the texture, and then you just reverse it.
Happy to jump on Discord/Zoom to talk through it.
I’ll be replacing the bottle with a smaller one (hah!) So I just need the track. I have the 3D model and texture as fbx and will do the replacement in Flame. Since I don’t use Nuke, I figured I can do it in Blender with a monthly sub of KeenTools.
Thanks a lot for the info and offer of help @allklier. I guess I’ll figure out Blender as I go along…
Learning Blender could be a bit of a time commitment? Since you can tackle the bottle rotation separately, you really just need a single Axis that mimics the movement and that you can parent your geo to. I’d be tempted to take an Axis with 2-point track and just do it manually. Just align each frame with the same place on the bottle, ignoring rotation. That will still be faster than learning Blender (unless you planned to do that anyway). For better or worse, had to get good at manual tracking axis, offset tracking, etc. lately for a set of shots.
Last week I had to stabilize a macro shot where every single tracker in the toolbox failed for me and others. In the end I did a quick one-point track to estimate the jittery frames, and then went into the animation editor, wiped out the irrelevant y-axis, and dialed in the stabilization by moving keyframes up/down to offset the jitter. Tedious, but gets there.
You could also try geometry tracking in Syntheyes if you have access to that.
I was going to suggest the mesh warp in Mocha Pro but realise you need to replace the whole bottle.
I remember being a junior on Editbox in the mid 90s having to replace Mountain Dew bottles with Pepsi Max ones which were also different shapes, sizes and colors of course. I wonder how on earth I did that back then considering what limited tools Editbox had. I half remember having the physical bottles and a rostrum camera and having to shoot multiple angles of the bottle to get it to work. I bet you if I watched one of them now, I’d cringe at how goddamn awful it must have looked. Bad stop motion animation no doubt. No wonder I was back then, and still am now, so in awe of Nick Park & Aardman.
Well, I remember manually tracking a label without subpixel accuracy in a program (they were called programs then, not applications) called Lumena Paint on a ATVista graphics board. Anyway, Keen will probably work the best.
But I was wondering if it would be possible to have that functionality in Flame. I can get 3 consistent 2d tracks on the bottle, I’m just trying to figure out something with expressions…
You mean Keentools in Flame? Those discussion have happened, the devs would consider it, but there’s no suitable HUD UI from what I remember. Matchbox is unsuitable, sparks no longer exist, and not sure what the exact issue with OFX is, or if that’s just too different from how the their tool works.
That said, I understand from conversations in a different Discord channel that there’s an effort to integrate OFX into the ASWF (Academy Software Foundation) and maybe along those lines evolve OFX. Particularly the extensions BMD has made to access the GPU from their plugins and make that part of the standard. OFX is the most widely used interface now, and does exist in Flame as a baseline. Maybe that could open future opportunities for advanced tools like Keentools to function inside Flame.
Just used GeoTracker in Blender recently. Definitely worth learning as is so cheap and result are so good. @Sinan that shot is a perfect case scenario. Here is tutorial not only featuring a similar case, but also showing how to use masking to ignore certain areas.
I think Mocha could get a good track off of it. There are plenty of regions on the plane to work with. You can then use the track to drive whatever roto shapes you might need.
You might also be able to get a good track via the planer tracker using multiple masks, but I’ve always found that to hit or miss. Here’s a Grant Kay video explaining how:
Link to Syntheyes Geometry Tracking. Similar to Keen Tools in approach by the looks of it. You should be able to export something directly into Flame with it though instead of having to go via Blender. GeoH Tracking
Tutorials link on same page.
Hi Tim, gimme a buzz if you need a VFX sup mate!! 
