Camera Match has served us well for years, but it requires an ideal setup and easily breaks. Does anyone know of alternatives (external applications included) that are a bit more robust?
An example of a recent job that it didn’t work with was an aerial drone shot. There were about 10 points that were properly surveyed and visible on the photo, but the camera match was awful.
Sorry, I posted a comment on the wrong place
I use syntheyes quite a bit for camera matches, both stills and animations (mostly stills). It works surprisingly well with just a few guide lines. There may be better alternatives out there but it works very good for my needs.
Having used a lot of match move software (Bijou, Synth Eyes, PfTrack, Equalizer, etc.) I still like SynthEyes the best. PFTrack is a little better for matchmation stuff like head tracking for talking animal jaws and such, but SynthEyes is hard to beat for scene tracking, assuming you know how to use it supervised. (hell, even the auto produces acceptable results a lot of the time). It also has a planar tracker, which may not be quite as good or tweakable as Mocha (which I love), but it comes with SynthEyes.
Thanks for the responses - I’ll give Syntheyes a go!
i used to use icarus. what ever happened to them
Icarus was a university project that became pf track!
+1 for syntheyes over here too.
+1 Syntheyes, but not tried for stills, only moving footage. Didn’t know it could for s single frame?!
Yep - in the lens panel you drag out some lines and mark them as parallel to x, y and z as appropriate, then hit the align button and it’ll make you a camera.
nice, I’ll try now! And if you have a local survey you load that in?
Nope! The camera match is purely based on lines of perspective so it just uses lines drawn that sit parallel to lines at right angle so it’s mainly for things that are big and boxy, thankfully such as buildings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H3SREEWu\_M&feature=youtu.be
If you’ve got survey info I think you’d have to make trackers that last a single frame only and then use the lock point / from seed options for the tracker coordinates to force them to specific positions.
You’ve got that kind of matching in 3dsmax 2014+ called ‘Perspective Match’, only works well when you have nice straight lines unfortunately.
Yes Perspective Match is a good quick and dirty starting point.