Getting the solve from Synth Eyes to Max - Scale

[Adam H. Stewart]

I seem to be the only one confused with synth eyes - I apologize in advance for repeating myself. I am trying to solve a crane shot done in a studio. I have the meassurements from the studio and a couple of key elements positions. The shot solves fine in synth eyes the problem is when I get it back into max and try to line things up with my real world scale the whole things is pretty out of wack.

I watched the pokey tutorial - it's pretty fun, but I'm still confused as how to get things to line up properly with my max set. Another seems to be with the points created for the camera in max - synth eyes seems to be creating a very jagged line line for the camera path.

To make things worse they haven't bought me a copy of synth eyes yet so have to go through a third party to get the solving done ( it's a guy in house ) but it's not the same as doing it yourself on you're own rig.

Any pointers on the must have meassurements or procedure ?


Thanks as always

Adam

[joconnell]

If you've got one good measurement that you can see for a while in the shot then you can set up a distance constraint or put in coordinates for one of your points - Say for example if you've got two points on a straight edge that you're using as the origin and a point along the x axis then put in a coordinate for the point on the x axis and you should push everything into the right direction in terms of scale - ideally just the one measurement should make everything lock into place if syntheyes has solved an accurate version of the world. I've found in some cases that if you put in too many measurements that it makes the solve worse - almost as if you're trying to shoehorn something into a shape it doesn't want to go in to. That said the way I work isn't an advertisement for the correct way to do things

[Adam H. Stewart]

Thanks for the help - I'm fighting a battle over here to do things the right way and really solve the track, I hate when people go off half cocked and when they don't get something right straight away they throw up their hands and claim that it is impossible - Impossible is nothing I say :] - I'll get me a copy of Synth Eyes and put you're theories to test -

thanks as always

Adam

[Da_elf]

i had a scale issue once with icarus and i just grabbed all of the helpers and the camera created and linked to a dummy and scaled the dummy

[Adam H. Stewart]

Scaling everything around a dummy seemed to be working at first with the track - but I also had a camera roll problem, it's such a nightmare when you start to cheat things - it usually works for the beginning of track - or somewhere in the middle but then drifts off. I don't mind doing tweaking when you're 95% there but I've made the mistake many times where I try to fix things by eye too early and end up just doing lots of guessed keyframing -that winds up looking awful.
Nah there is only one solution - I'll have to sit down and learn the software :[ - but I'm sooo lazy :]

Thanks for the help

Adam

[dellis]

Definitely use the distance constraint. Its generally the easiest way to setup scale.

[joconnell]

Scaling everything around a dummy seemed to be working at first with the track - but I also had a camera roll problem, it's such a nightmare when you start to cheat things - it usually works for the beginning of track - or somewhere in the middle but then drifts off.

The only way that this works is to make sure your null is at 0,0,0 and it's rotation is 0,0,0 in world space - this ensures that objects that get parented don't inherit any additional transforms to mess things up, but yeah getting it from the syntheyes solve is generally better.

[Neilg]

I dont know how much you've tried, but whenever i've done a track i'll create a plane in max snapping to 4 points which I know are flat (and the ones which it's most likley to have bang on), group the whole lot then normal align the plane to the corresponding model in the max scene. Throw the pivot on the corners that line up and scale till it clicks into place in the viewport.

Can easily see if it's tracked wrong or fucked up the camera this way too.

[joconnell]

True but i'd rather move the scene and not the track - if you start adding in extra rotations on top of the fcurve of the camera you can start causing issues.

[Neilg]

Surely if you group it, it's the group that contains all the movement information and not the tracking solve/camera? Or is that irrelevant?

I just assumed it'd work when I was trying different methods a while back and i've not seen any issues, so far at least. haha.

[Adam H. Stewart]

Great tips - it's driving me nuts here at work because they have decided to track in the footage using a crappy AE 3D environment and I'm creating sexy glass frames in max that they are going to paste onto solids. The guy doing the tracking is just too lazy to figure it out - I'll have to make sure I'm doing it from now on.

Maybe I'll just buy a copy for my home rig and play with it my spare time - properly tracked footage looks so awesome when you add in some 3D for kicks.

Thanks as always