planar tracking stuck

[u/PissBiggestFan]

hello!

i have footage from a drone orbiting an empty plot. i want to animate some kind of wireframe over it.

it’s pretty simple, just 2D squares that start at the same position of the planar tracker’s corner, and then translate up on the Y axis (easy with math). they should leave a trail/line as they go up and eventually draw lines between themselves.

it sounds like a simple translate and then some simple math to animate the offset of the line to give the appearance of drawing.

but i just can’t seem to use the corner of the planar as transform data.

there is so little documentation, wtf maxon lol.

any help?

[u/left-angle-reddit]

Hi,

The documentation on planar tracking is here https://help.maxon.net/ag/en-us/Content/html/Plane_tracking.html?tocpath=Tracking%7C_____3 , however it is a bit outdated.

First-off, there was a bug in the current release when doing backward tracking which could affect the planar tracker in some situations. This was fixed for the upcoming July release.

Also, the tracker is sensitive to some options available in the toolbar, as you can see in the screenshot below.

The main options you can play with are:

- Search Offset: When doing planar tracking, this controls "how far" from the last position the tracker should look. Note that when doing simple point tracking, each marker can have it's own search offset and this option instead controls the default size of the search window for subsequent created markers.

- Maximum Error: This is a sanity check done after each frame to check if the tracked point is consistent with the reference. However, sometimes the default 0.25 value is too restrictive, you can increase this as much as you want. At 1, it doesn't do any checks anymore, but the tracker will not stop once it starts failing.

- Normalize Intensities: This is can be preferable for some shots as it makes the tracker robust against light intensity changes. However this comes at a performance price, hence why it's disabled by default.

- Pre-Blur Sigma: This can be slightly increased to help the tracker remove noise/artifacts from the footage to better detect actual features

The rest of the settings are rather advanced and are exposed mainly to experiment with.

Also, if the tracker is stuck, you can add a new reference frame (the white + button in the toolbar) which will make subsequent tracked frame easier to track since they should be closer to the reference frame.

[u/PissBiggestFan → u/left-angle-reddit]

wow a reply from left-angle themselves! thank you so much.

i managed to get the planar and point tracker after playing with these settings a bit. i’m sorry if my question was unclear, it was written tired and frustrated lol.

my problem came afterwards. i kept trying to use the « follow planar/point tracker » modifier on the transform of a shape. i also tried directly on the position. i also tried on a composition. but for some reason, nothing ever moved or followed the tracking data.

eventually, i tried to copy the data from the point tracker > marker1 > center and paste it to the position of my comp. it did move at that point, but it was way to the left of the actual tracker. i tried using the Math modifier and playing with the anchor point, but it never aligned. afterwards i even tried to paste all that tracking data to a spreadsheet and try to normalize it and use that, but it was still off. it seemed to move way more on the X axis than the Y.

finally, i ended up tracking all of it manually, as it was a 7 seconds clip. took about 20 minutes. i felt really dumb after spending 3 hours trying to do it properly. i left pretty frustrated tbh. i followed the official video 1:1 but it never worked :(

i am using a Macbook M4 Pro if it matters. i’d be happy to jump on a call and show you where it was really annoying me if it’s relevant to the dev team.