Camera Tracking Frustration

Hi! So I’m relatively new to Blender, but I’ve decided to take on camera tracking. I have a very low solve error, but for some reason, Blender’s camera is not moving at all correctly to fit my model into the scene. I’ve attached the file I’m working on below:

Complete Camera Tracking Frustration.blend (1.56 MB)

Note: I filmed this on a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, so I refined the optical center and the focal length to stop the FOV from going all weird.

Can you post a link to the footage? Having the original footage to look at would be very helpful.
Judging from the scene though it looks like your shot has no parallax which can cause a solve to go awry.

you need to track more of your footage than that little cluster in the bottom of your clip. your low solve is a false positive, there is no depth in the track what so ever

This, your tracks should cover the entire frame at different depths.

Good points.
Also if all you need is to track something to that one particular area, you’re better off just doing a 2D track or planar tracking.

It looks like (from the file) he is trying to add in a 3D character…

if there is not enough parallax going on your best bet is to do a tripod solve.

Oh you can’t track 3d objects in blender with 2D tracking yet? I’d love to suggest that feature as other trackers like the one in Flame can. You get lovely change in perspective for simple things like this. It really works a charm!

You can totally do that.

That tutorial is a bit old and the UI is a bit different now, but overall it should be still similar now.
Not sure if that’s what you mean though.

That’s object tracking which is different from what I was talking about. I didn’t know you can object track in blender though so that’s pretty cool :slight_smile:
In Flame you can 2D track a feature on the plate, place the geometry in your action node and pipe the tracking info from the tracker to the 3d geometry. So you get geometric distortion without having to do a full on camera solve. It works great for dolly shots on the xy axes.

I don’t know how Flame works, but this does sound to me like Plane Track:

No, just your standard, everyday 2d point tracker.
Planar tracking requires 4 points and as a result youre working with corner pin data which is not the case. Flame does have a nice planar tracker and im sure you could use it instead to an extent but a simple single point tracker would work great in this case.
Using the method I describe above the amount of geometric distortion depends on the camera’s fov(camera in action node), not the tracking data itself.

And wouldn’t it work to just use the track as an empty and use that in the 3d viewport?
(“Link Empty to track”)

Yes! Didn’t even know blender had that capability :slight_smile: I never do my tracking in blender because nobody looks for blender tracking skills on a resume around these parts :wink: which is why I am ignorant of some of the tracking features in blender. So yes that’s essentially the same concept.