Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.62/Motion Tracker

Blender 2.62: Motion Tracker

Object Tracking

Object tracking in Blender

Object tracking support has been added, so that not only camera animation can be reconstructed from footage, but also the animation or transformation of objects in the scene. - r43007

There is now a list of objects to be tracked, with by default a single Camera object used for solving camera motion. Other objects can be added and each of them will have its own list of tracks. Only one object can be used for camera solving at this moment. A new "Object Tracking" constraint was added, which can be added to objects to apply the reconstructed animation. This constraint can be converted to F-Curves like all other motion tracking constraints - r43119.

• Scene orientation tools can be used for orienting object to bundles.
• Object has got scale to define "depth" in camera space.
• All tools which works with list of tracks or reconstruction data now gets that lists from active editing object.
• All objects and their tracking data are available via python api.
• Improvements in witness cameras workflow,

Tracks copy/paste operator can be used to copy tracks from one object to another (which is useful when features were occasionally tracked in wrong object) - r43244.

Track Preview Widget

Track preview widget now uses bicubic image filtering for more accurate placement of marker and correcting it's jumps and sliding.

Internally, tracking algorithm is using grayscale version of frames when tracking happens. It's not always obvious which channels gives highest contrast of feature and also not always obvious which color channel contains more noise and better to be disabled. Now this widget displays actual image which tracking algorithm is using when some color channels are disabled. It is also possible to make it display grayscale image for all channels enabled. - r42996

Faked facial makeup

By default Follow Track constraint is making object have the same position at frame as track has and motion of this objects happens on a single plane defined by camera and original object position.

Since r43134 it's possible to set Depth Object in Follow Track constraint. If this object is set, constrained object would be projected onto surface of this depth object which can be used to make faked facial makeup.

Curves view

• Curve points of tracks curves now can be selected for X and Y channels separately and can be moved along Y axis of curve viewer, points currently can't change frame they belong to. This allows to smooth spikes caused by unwanted marker jump. - r43499
• Darken frames outside of scene frame range in curves view. - r43714
• Added View All and Jump to Current Frame operator. - r43714
• Curves view can be locked to time cursor (Lock to Time Cursor in Display panel or L button in curve view). - r43720

Smaller changes:

• Curves view shouldn't jump back to top when click on it - r43725
• Added hotkey to toggle curve view (Z key) - r43715

Movie Clip Editor

• Cleanup of display panels: - r43908
  • Split display options into two panels:
    • Display, which contains all general display options related on editor itself
    • Marker Display, which contains options which makes sense for markers themselves and not used so often.
  • Remove Show GPencil option which doesn't actually make sense because strokes might be disabled from GPencil panel
  • Removed Show Pyramid option and show pyramid for KLT tracker as default.
• Color channels can be disabled for the whole frame in clip editor. - r43400
• Proxy sizes for original and undistortted footages are now controlling separately. - r43825

Smaller changes:

• Added hotkey to toggle Show Disabled (Alt-D)
• Added hotkey to toggle Show Pattern (Alt-S)

Python API

• List of tracking objects can be accessed using tracking.objects array. - r43007
• marker_find_frame moved to MovieTrack.markers and called find_frame. - r43242
• Added MovieTrack.markers.insert_frame to insert marker at specified frame. - r43242
• Added MovieTrack.markers.delete_frame to delete marker from specified frame. - r43242
• Marker's frame number is now writable from Python API. - r43243

Other improvements and fixes

• Disable markers when doing frame-by-frame tracking and tracker library returns failure - r43008
• Make Link Empty to Track and Bundles to Mesh operators set properly used clip and cameras which resolves possible conflicts when several clips or witness cameras are used. - r43121, r44002
• Fixes for cases when witness cameras are used. - r43124
• Default tracking settings can be copied from active track. - r43729
• Color channels used for tracking added to default tracking settings and presets. - r43730
• Manual calibration will now respect GP layer's hidden flag. - r43982
• Corrected detection of 8 tracks so it wouldn't count tracks disabled on keyframes. - r43691
• Track's statistics text will fit pattern position instead of search if marker is disabled on current frame. - r43691
• Fixed toggle selection operator if selected track is hidden due to "Hide Disabled" policy. - r43691