Planar Tracking a Fuzzy Cloud Without Clear Features

Track & Paint Workflow: Tracking When Perspective Fails

Tracking a cloud? It sounds counterintuitive—clouds aren’t flat, their edges are fuzzy, and they lack the crisp corner detail we typically rely on for planar tracking. Yet, this is precisely the kind of challenge that teaches us when to adapt our workflow.

This Insight demonstrates how to successfully track a non-planar, organic shape using Fusion’s Planar Tracker.

You’ll discover when to step down from full perspective tracking to simpler modes like Affine (Translation, Rotation, Scale + Shear), and you’ll learn a reusable stabilize-and-retrack workflow that lets you paint on moving footage without wrestling with motion.

“We are reducing the amount of geometrical complexity that [Fusion] is allowed to consider. And if we do this, hopefully it will track through… We can track surfaces which aren’t perfectly planar. Usually, we have to go up in our list from perspective to one or two levels above and see if it’s still working. And often it does.”

Bernd Klimm, VFX Artist

Key Takeaways

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

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Mentioned Resources