Hi All ,
Is there by chance a preferred tracking software application for exporting camera data to Houdini. Its an area I know nothing about but ease of use and less fiddling the better. Would love some words of wisdom !

Rob

Not a preferred in terms of ‘whats best for Houdini’, not really. I've heard Syntheyes works great, we use pftrack and 3DEqualizer. Occasionally you'll got odd little hiccups in the exporters from some companies but it's rarely anything you can't hack around very quickly.

I would base your choice on the ease/quality/value of the tracking software to make that decision. Just verify with them they support Houdini in some form(there's now also FBX importing).

Cheers,

J.C.

Exporting to Houdini is pretty straight forward in Syntheyes.. it spits out a .cmd script that you run inside Houdini to create a camera with animation and a bunch of nulls representing the tracker dots. That's it.

Sorry to revive the subject more than a year later but I have a question about camera tracking in Houdini and I thought it better not to open a new thread.

How does it work in Houdini once the tracking is imported? Can we move the camera and then the subsequent movements would be updated as well?

For example, let's say the camera rotates left, then right and finally translates backward.
I place my camera at the origin and the tracking is imported to the camera is moving as described above.

Now, I just noticed the camera should have started from (1,1,0) in 3D space. If I move my original camera from (0,0,0) to (1,1,0), will the camera still do the sequence ‘rotate left - rotate right - translate backward’ according to the (1,1,0) or would it jump to (0,0,0) when rotate time has come?

Sorry if I'm not clear …

Hi Chistopher,

kurisutofu
How does it work in Houdini once the tracking is imported? Can we move the camera and then the subsequent movements would be updated as well?

No, that would require recalculating each and every keyframe of your cameras. But why would you want to do this anyway? If you want to correct glitches in the tracked movement, it's better to do that in your tracking software. (If that is still available)

kurisutofu
Sorry if I'm not clear …

Hope I got your point, right ?

what about using a null and parent the tracked camera to it?

WhoDjini
But why would you want to do this anyway?

Sorry I'm new to that and I'm trying to understand. I don't have any concrete project for that so far.
But I was thinking that camera tracking would be to add some 3D object on a video, right? And then I thought what would happen if the camera is not set properly at the beginning. We thought we put it properly but after the movement starts, you can see it's off a bit and the 3D seems to “float” on the video, do you see what I mean?
Wouldn't we need to reset it then?

sum][one
what about using a null and parent the tracked camera to it?

If you're asking me, I would say why not, I haven't even tried camera tracking anyway.

If you're asking WhoDjini, sorry for the confusion ^_^