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Re-Animating a Camera Move in Post (Patreon)

Published:
2020-05-09 01:45:10
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

This is one of those things I've thought about a lot but never actually done- it turned out to be really easy! Definitely has limitations, but could also be a lifesaver (Also a great way to kind of stabilize a shot, if you delete the camera tracker constraint and just animate from scratch- could be a bit surreal :D). If you haven't already seen it, the motion tracking/room transformation tutorial is probably a prerequisite if you're not familiar with the blender tracker- it shows how to track the shot and set up the point cloud all nice in blender. It's exactly the method I used for this clip. 

Files

Re-Animating a Camera in Post

The first part of this tut (tracking and generating the point cloud) can be seen here! https://youtu.be/lY8Ol2n4o4A

Comments

Erich Stenzel

Yeah. Ian. Ok. Just stop. Stop already. Speaking for myself, you are making me feel like a total clod! "Look at this toothpick I modeled," I say to my cat. She still loves me. :-D

David Sandberg

Did it still work as expected when rendered? I tried to do a similar thing recently and the texture coordinates did not update correctly when rendering the animation (it only worked in the viewport).

Mark Miller

Slick, man. Would be interesting to track in multiple cameras moves with other detail (like the patio on top). The freedom to not match the original camera move perfectly is pretty powerful. Do you know if blender can track 360 degree camera footage?

IanHubert

Oh man yeah! You could totally track in other cameras! On one hand I'd say it'd make more sense to leave the camera locked down on a tripod, but on the other hand, the 3d movement helps you get the point cloud, which helps make recreating the environment waaayyyy easier (although you could also use an app like DisplayLand to get a reference model of the environment, then project the footage onto THAT- could give you great parallax data).

Left Swift

Thank you so much for sharing. Cant wait to try this!

IanHubert

Wait what!?!? Okay let me do a test render. -Okay yeah, fortunately renders alright in Cycles/Eevee. I wonder what was happening on your end? Were you using the UV project modifier? I don't think it's used very frequently, so it's likely it could still have some bugs. ALSO OH HELLO! Thanks for being here :D

IanHubert

Oh also- huh- no idea if it can track 360 degree camera footage... that'd be wild! Although I think it can project it alright.

Mark Miller

Yeah. I guess I don't really know what that means WRT Blender's normal treatment of 360 environments (at infinity as far as I can tell). I guess 360 only provides larger parallax, but it's probably not an advantage for tracking. I was thinking more about spraying texture on literally everything.

Mark Miller

The way to do that is probably track the camera from one stable projection, then map it all in as an array of cameras facing several different directions from the same point.

max pirrit

would love to see the finished shot

shonal bose

Ian this Technic is used a lot in nuke..they have it as (project cam) where they project the camera texture and have model builder node to build the set...seeing you do this in blender is really refreshing...is it possible you send can the project file so we can see this workflow...

Zeke Faust

If nothing else that would be a great way of stitching together multiple shots into one smooth camera move a la 1917

Nathan Vegdahl

I'm really enjoying seeing all of these workflows you're coming up with, which seem to basically be using Eevee as a 3d compositor. Super cool stuff!

Doug Brown

Woa... way beyond my skills... I barely understood any of that... but hey I can see you are a force for good... So good!

Lethal Bacon

Amazing stuff as always! Have you got any spare footage like this that you could give?, as I would love to experiment with some quality footage similar to this. Even some spare green screen footage with a moving camera would be awesome to test.

akim mohideen

amazing.. waiting for the green screen one... thanks

joonas Tähtinen

I wanted to share something I have been working on. I have a stationary 360 video camera in the middle of the scene that projects the environment to a box. Then I have started to build my little scene in the middle of it. Here is a screen shot of it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x9bt0s53k0q8si4/Screenshot%202020-05-09%2015.55.37.png?dl=0 And here is the vector node set up to get the 360 projection on to the box: https://www.dropbox.com/s/eo2h8fbz6rj2ub5/Screenshot%202020-05-09%2015.55.43.png?dl=0 The Box's whole PBR texture is done from the video file. I learned the texturing method originally from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eQJCN5KBuA It's cool how now I can move the camera 360 degrees and there is always background behind. I could imagine that Ian could make something amazing with this technique.

Mark Miller

joonas, any reason not to just use an environment map for that (rather than manual projection onto a box)?

Mark Miller

joonas, oh dang. Just looked at the screenshots. I see the difference now. Looks super powerful.

IanHubert

Oh! yeah, I can try to upload a couple clips today :)

David Sandberg

Thanks! Yeah, the uv project modifier. I'll have to experiment some more now that I know it can work.

shonal bose

thanks a lot IAN you are a sweetypie..

Shabs C

wow. is ther an update on the greenscreen tut Ian?

joonas Tähtinen

It's for a stereo 360 video and I wanted the ground to feel like it's where it belongs. :-) You could make the box something else than a box. I could model the wholes city basically and it's surprisingly intuitive to model from the 360 projection. Just slide the vertexes around until they match the grooves and corners. And with a sky mask, I get nice shadows from the city's skyline. I did the mask in after effects with a rotoscoping tool.

zephirus

Hi Ian, thanks again for your amazing work. It's not directly related with this video but can you show us how to cast shadows when using 3D and real footage and Eevee? I know how to do it using cycles but not with Eevee. Thanks!

Zeke Faust

you can use the shader to rgb node to generate an alpha mask for the shadow

IanHubert

Here you go! Just some random tracking/keying stuff. Not exactly "quality", haha, but it's the best I got! "walkaround" is probably a good one to play around with if you're looking for greenscreen/3dtracking combo footage.

Per Kofod Hansen

hmm - I wonder if some of this could be used to light the real world with CG lights using a projector (in real world)

IanHubert

Totally!! This is effectively projection mapping. The process of lining up the render with an actual projector on actual geometry could be tricky, but yeah! Oooo Actually yeah- if you set up the projector as another monitor, you could actually just work in the viewport and have it project on the scene in real time- could make it a lot easier to line everything up!

Lethal Bacon

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you dude!

zephirus

Thanks Faust, I tried that but didn't work for me. Anyway, in the end I rendered my animation shadows using shadow catcher + cycles and redenred the rest using holdout shader + eevee.

Max

Hey Ian! You do fantastic things! and I have a question for you: Will you make a lesson about steam and smoke that you use in your shots? it would be amazing!

IanHubert

Oh man yeah! It's usually just footage of steam set up as the mix factor for a translucent/transparent material on a plane (usually in the viewport, sometimes in the composite). I shot some new elements a while back that I want to get all optimized/loopable, and I'll post em here with a tut soon! :D

Mobo Boehme

Thanks for this Ian! I've been looking how to do Projection Cameras in an effective way for a long time ! I wish I knew it was so easy hahah Thanks!

Bo Maryniuk

If Blender doesn't generate a right flame/smoke for Ian, then Ian generates flame/smoke for Blender. :-)

elu

OH THIS IS GREAT, I AM NEW HERE AND I AM AMAZED. COULD THIS SAME TECHNIQUE BE REPLICATED IN BLACKMAGIC FUSION?

elu

oh, did my previous comment die? Thanks for this, it's a diamond

Carter Burr-Kirven

Definitely! You could do this in any software that supports camera projection onto 3D geometry—Fusion, Nuke... you could even do it in After Effects, although you'd be limited to planes instead of proper geo.

IanHubert

Ah, thanks Carter!! Yeah, I figure this should be possible in most programs, it just has to be able to update the perspective it's "projecting" from- and it sounds like that's pretty standard? Even if not, projecting from a static camera onto 3d geometry could still open some pretty cool doors!! Very excited to see what you do with it!!

IanHubert

Me too! Hahaha. So many things I kept avoiding (3d motion tracking and all that), and I'm so glad I've finally gotten into it!

elu

excuse the idiotic question. What do you mean by updating perspective?

IanHubert

Oh! No idiotic at all! With typical projection mapping, you just have to line up the model with the image (ideally lining it up with the cameras POV), and everything's great. But if you're dealing with footage, the perspective of the camera can be different on every frame as the camera moves, so you can't just use the camera's perspective on the first frame, or everything'll get funky really quick. This might not be applicable for your situation, though!

elu

Sure, it sounds very logical, in that case, I think it all lies in doing good modeling and looking for the ideal framework to do the projection, right? Thanks for answering my questions, I feel like I'm a little less ignorant today.

elu

hi ian, me again. Do you think you can share the 3d scene from this tutorial? I would like to try it if I can. regards

IanHubert

Oh! I saved over the file seen here in the video to make the final version of the project, but I could potentially re-create it? Would uploading just the footage be useful?

Mike L. Taylor

Wow! Great tip about the projection modifier. I had no idea that existed. Lol

elu

yes, that would be great

IanHubert

Me neither!! I'm going to use it all the time, haha!

Jourdan Biziou

Terrific :) Thanks Ian for the generous gift of your process. Great lessons and fun to watch !

Kai Christensen

This is actually a real technique that was used on the inside-the-black-hole bookshelf scene in Interstellar! While all the copies of the set were digital, the instance of it that Matthew McConaughey was interacting with was real geometry with moving, stretched textures being physically projected live onto the set while he was performing. CG is awesome, don't get me wrong, but practical stuff still blows my mind all the time!

Superfly

So here is my problem: I motion tracked a 4k scene (mov file)-> Camera projected on planes with UV project modifier (emission object of course).. all good. Now I want to change the footage that is emitted to 2k format or a smaller resolution of that initial mov file because the viewport is running with 2 fps and I cannot really work with 4k footage in the viewport, but when I repoint the projection again (change basically just the file from 4k to smaller) the camera projection starts sliding on the objects instead of being fixed, like the textures move

IanHubert

Did you ever get this figured out? Unfortunately there are a BUNCH of little things that could cause that (for example, if you have a video clip, and swap it out in the node editor for another one, it'll ignore the frame number and reset it to 1, and uncheck "auto refresh", so you have to redo that every time you swap em out)- so make sure it's actually using more than just the first frame. Also- I know you know, but if the 2k version is at all a different frame range, it won't sync up anymore. That said- you posted this a few days ago- were you able to figure it out??

Superfly

Hi Ian, thank you for writing back. Short answer: it was the framerate Filmed in 24 fps and blender running by default in 30 :) No wonder things were moving strange .