3D Studio MAX drone video match tutorial

Hi guys,
does anyone know of a good tutorial to make an animation of archviz exterior to match a drone video? Couldn’t find it myself.
thanks

It’ll largely depend on what software you’ll use to track the motion, so whichever that is there will be available tutorial content for that.
There are quite a few options to choose from…Syntheyes comes up top for many people, so maybe worth a look, though there are more of course :slight_smile:

Drone footage should be easy to track - try camera tracker from max first.

Wouldn’t I have to use whatever is in MAX? Since it’ll animate the camera and render. Or do you mean MAX plugins?

External tracking software will spit out an animated camera for you, so no, not necessarily a requirement to use Max’s tracking tools.

@piotrus3333 's suggestion was indeed 3dsMax’s inbuilt camera tracking utility which may do the job without needing extra software.

With standalone software you’d typically input the footage, track it, then export a tracked camera to Max.

I see. I guess no tutorials then :slight_smile: I’ve only seen sveral for the stills. Guess I’d put some trees around my 3D area with negative alpha and for shadows and then match it in Davinci. After the camera match of course.

Hey,
we have done this piece last year:
https://www.pixelbox.cz/galerie/3d-animation-and-spot-for-p3-logistic-parks-p3-ostrava-central/

and it was a matching hell!!!
we ended up using tracking sw within AE which kind of did the job.
The biggest problem is the scale of the captured area by the drone. The bigger it is the worse it gets.
M

Drone output might be quite distorted - lens correction is most likely necessary.

edit: at least for 3ds max tracker, Resolve might be much smarter.

Just tried it with some random drone footage I found online and then realized max camera tracker needs me to recreate at least some areas to scale in MAX so I can match the video to 3D scene. So that won’t work since I don’t have the random scene I downloaded in 3D. So I guess I won’t be able to test this unless I get some drone footage of an area that is also measured for 3D?

facepalm emoji.
maybe try on “drone” footage of a box on the floor. shot with your phone.

Like your video very much!!

Are you using brute force and light cache setting for this video?

Hi, yes this was BF/LC, 4K output. Time per frame went from 30 minutes to 2 hrs :))))

Thank you for your reply

I meant something like Davinci Resolve Studio, it tracks the footage and then lets you select the scale. I assumed MAX had this or something similar given how many new releases they keep having and “adding features”.

From our long experience we find that the best result for this kind of job are the NUKE … only “legaly” presentable we have this one…

I’m not sure Nuke is a valable recommendation for somebody that already has Fusion and only drone footage to track.

@Crayox13 do it in Fusion. it’s a great tracker.

Hi there, id does not know, he has a Fusion, we have played with lots of SW .. besides mentioned also with PFTrack, Syntheyes ( which are pretty good also ) but in the end, we find NUKE + 3dsmax to be best for general tracking .. and drone footage especially.. but really depand on preferences .. SW background etc. :wink:

I was thinking more about value vs cost. Nuke for just tracking does not make sense. Or at least I can’t imagine it being so much better than other soft.

I will make mental to-do note: google camera trackers comparison.

We used to use https://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/pftrack/ to track, then import in max. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsOjdEjPVAc lots of tutorials on youtube.