Camera Tracker Improvement Ideas

Hello Eveyone!

Side Note: I’m extremely new here so if I’m breaking any rules or anything, please tell me!

I’ve been using Blender for a few years now. Mostly for visual effects and the like. During my time as a blender VFX artist, I’ve found the tracking tool in blender an essential feature for merging live action footage with CG elements. Since I have used it so much, I have some ideas for features that I would like to make for the camera tracker. I don’t have any experience in programming add ons for blender so maybe you all could help me develop my ideas so they can be shared with the community! So heres what I have so far:

  1. Improved Tracking Marker Refinement

I know that this is already a feature in blender, I’m just looking to improve it. Lets start with an example. Your tracking a marker through a piece of footage. After a few frames, the marker begins to slide off of its position. Now you go back to where it starts to slide, move it to where its supposed to be, and than continue tracking. Now this works to some extent, but it can be so much better. I propose a drop down menu in the tracking tab called “Tracking Marker Refinement”. When expanded, it shows a table. Above the table is the name of the currently selected tracking marker. To the right of that is a button that says “Add Keyframe”. When clicked, a keyframe is added on the current frame and at the current position of the marker. As more keyframes are added, they populate the table. The table shows data about the keyframes like a picture of where the keyframe is, the frame it’s on, X and Y position of the keyframe, and possibly other data. When you have reached the number of keyframes desired, you click a button at the bottom labeled “Refine Keyframe”. This tracks the marker through the footage, using the set keyframes as reference. Keyframes can be added and removed as needed.

  1. Frame Specific Tracker Error Display Options (what a mouthful!)

(This may already be a feature in Blender. If someone knows how to do it, please tell me how!). When ever I solve my camera, all my markers have red or green dots in the middle of them. These colors change as I scrub through the footage. I assume that these colors show the error of the tracking marker on the current frame. I think that I would be helpful if there was a more precise scale for measuring the error of markers. The scale would look something like this: green for good, yellow for ok, orange for bad, and red for terrible. This would make it easy to see problem spots in your trackers. The data could also be displayed in the tracker path or the tracking marker dope sheet.

  1. Tracking Point Grid Generator

This is my third and final feature proposal. Now that we have the weighted tracking point setting, we can easily make reference points for scene reconstruction. This is currently done by setting the tracking weight to zero, using the detect features button, and tracking the markers created. An example of what I’m talking about here: http://vimeo.com/87658924#at=0. The problem with this is that some areas get tons of tracking points while others get none. Heres where this feature would help. It would add a button called “Point Grid”. When clicked, it generates a grid of evenly spaced tracking points. This way, you can evenly cover a piece of footage with tracking points. There would be several options such as number of points, point spacing, and grid starting position for further grid tuning.

So what do you think? Would these features be useful to you? Do you have ideas for improvements to the camera tracker? I would love to hear your feedback! I have a few years of programming under my belt in multiple languages, but like I said, no experience in python or blender development. If someone could give me some good tutorials or tell me what I will need to know in order to make these ideas happen, that would be great! It’s an ambitious project I know, but I’m willing to put a lot of hard work into it! I may also try to post some pictures showing how the menus and stuff might look like. Also, no promises that all of these features will actually get developed. Well, until next time!

-Will