I’ve been thinking of making a short movie with 3D mixed in live footage. I’ve seen 2 options for that: Tomato Branch and Voodoo, an external tracker. Now my question is: Which one is best? As far as I know (though I could be wrong), the Tomato branch is indeed sort of a bit easier as it’s in Blender itself, plus you get many options for customizing everything.
However, If i’m not mistaking, Blender Tomato does not support 3D tracking yet, so the track would **** up if I were to track a video when I’m walking forward with the camera.
Also, as far as I know, the tracking process in Voodoo is automated, wheres Blender requires you to manually select good tracking points.
Any feedback and/or advice on which one to pick would be greatly appreciated, as would some corrections if what I’m saying was totally wrong!
I’ve never gotten voodoo to work
since voodoo doesn’t support blender 2.5, you need to manually fix the .py
there’s an import voodoo add on blender.org but i’ve never tried it
whoa…way off the mark (i think!).
voodoo is quite easy to set up, and ive gotten fine results with it. voodoo has an option when exporting to export to “2.4x” or “2.5x or higher” http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html#blender
i used it in circa blender 2.56 with absolutely no problems.
so maybe things have changed since then…? i dont think so, but its possible.
so basically: voodoo works fine, i have used it.
tomato branch i hardly used, i opened it only once. if im not mistaken you have to manually set the tracking points yourself. voodoo has automatic detection.
hope this helps!
it does make it sound like the voodoo export doesnt work straight into blender; but that you need to run voodoo’s script through the blender import script…i’ll try importing a voodoo script into 2.59 now…
EDIT 2: I stand corrected. a voodoo script i had from a while back failed to import into blender 2.59. i’ll try that import script out.
Tomato branch is now on very high level. Its simple and quality. You need to know few tricks and you will motion track everything with highest precision. I tried voodoo and got only to problems so I took tomato and I am very happy with it.
BTW: You can let tomato to track but you need to tweak tracking points, change the tracking algorythm ,find your camera presset and go.
Tomato can track a camera that’s moving forward. Here’s a rough draft of a track that I’m working on. The camera is flying low over some mountains. It starts out pretty well but gets pretty jerky toward the end. I think that’s because the ground drops away dramatically. I haven’t messed around with the new Clean Track features. Maybe that will help clean it up.
@ wysiwyg: I used voodoo with blender 2.56 and it worked fine, shortly after the official release of 2.56 a change in the python api made the voodoo scripts incompatible with blender. One of the changes was set_frame became frame_set (or the other way around) the 2nd change had to do with matrix data, I think you have to add extra parenthesis in the voodoo .py script to get it to work. I thought about writing an add-on that would take the voodoo .py script and update for current versions of blender, but with the tomato branch being as good as it is, I figured there wouldn’t be much use for it.
Which is good, because the long computation time, random crashes and extremely variable results make it totally unsuitable for commercial work.
They have released a commercial version called “VooCat”, but it’s exactly the same. My advice: don’t go there. Either soldier on with tomato or buy a copy of Syntheyes, which is stable and well supported.