Planar Tracking a Semitransparent Surface – Quick and Easy

Using a Texture Extraction Trick to Get a Better Planar Track

Sometimes, a hard tracking problem becomes solvable with the right preprocessing. In today’s Insight, we’re faced with a dirty window that keeps confusing Resolve’s planar tracker; the background shining through completely derails the track.

In this Short, we apply frequency separation to focus the planar tracker on the foreground texture while ignoring the blurry background. The technique is simple, surprisingly effective, and solves a tracking challenge that initially appears impossible.

The initial attempt to planar-track a window fails because the tracker sees the soft background shining through. When transparent or semitransparent surfaces are involved, traditional tracking approaches often struggle because they can’t distinguish between the sharp details in the foreground and the out-of-focus elements behind them. You need to help the tracker by isolating what’s essential.

“I blur out the texture so that I don’t see it anymore… From this blurred-out version, I take a difference with the version that is not blurred out… [The track] should now fully relate to the window and hopefully very little to the background.”

Bernd Klimm, VFX Artist

Key Takeaways

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

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