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Mixing Light Short: Not everything that looks 3D needs 3D Tracking
Picture this: you have a panning shot of an office hallway, and you want to track the floor to composite a checkerboard pattern. The floor itself has no distinctive features, so planar tracking might be tricky. Naturally, you reach for 3D camera tracking—and at first glance, everything looks perfect…
…Features are detected throughout the shot with solid spatial distribution across the ceiling, walls, and background. The solve error comes back at an impressively low 0.19 pixels. Everything you’d typically hope for in a 3D camera track is right there in front of you.
But here’s where things get strange.
“Not everything that looks three-dimensional actually is three-dimensional, and a 3D camera tracker with a low solve [error] doesn’t mean that you have a 3D problem to solve in the first place.”
Bernd Klimm, VFX Compositor
When the Numbers Look Too Good to Be True
When you examine the solution in 3D space, the tracked points scatter unpredictably in Z-space. Background points appear closer to the camera than some foreground elements. You can’t recognize the geometric structure of the room at all – the points are spread out in ways that make no sense.
How can you have such a low solve error yet end up with geometrically nonsensical results? The answer reveals an important limitation of 3D tracking that’s worth understanding before you invest your limited time in complex workflows.
Key Takeaways
By the end of this Mixing Light Short Insight, you should understand how to:
Related Mixing Light Insights
External Links
If you want to follow along, you can download this shot free of charge from Pixabay:
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