Tracking Experiment

Azman, Nadia and I are working on a VFX short, so there's definitely a lot of tracking work ahead for us.

I was trying to think of a practical method of tracking everything that :

• didn't rely on auto-tracking [too many points, accuracy is suspect + too hard to make precise corrections]
• doesn't require a whole lot of measuring work for survey data [too tiring and prone to errors if measurements don't match up]
• doesn't depend too much on different perpendicular planes to define spatial dimensions [limits the locations/settings that we plan to shoot in]
• uses tracking points from whatever's already in the scene [no need for manual tracking markers, minimizing painting and post-work to cover them up]
  

After a night of experimenting, a little trigonometry, and a little help from Nadia, I think I've managed to come up with a low-tech solution that might work. Here's our first test. A bit shaky [the measurements were done very carelessly], but I think we proved the technique works.

Insight3D - Open Source Image-Based Modelling Tool

Continuing my obsession with interesting free stuff...

insight3d lets you create 3D models from photographs. You give it a series of photos of a real scene (e.g., of a building), it automatically matches them and then calculates positions in space from which each photo has been taken (plus camera’s optical parameters) along with a 3D pointcloud of the scene. You can then use insight3d’s modeling tools to create textured polygonal model.

If this works as well as it says it does [I haven't tried it out yet], it could prove really useful in collecting survey data for tracking purposes really really quick... we could totally skip the process of measuring everything in detail.

More info and download links HERE and online tutorial HERE

Kreatif 2010 Program Schedule

It's out!