I am an extreme newbie with Blender, but have worked with Maya, Houdini, and Nuke for years.
I was trying to camera track an 850-frame shot that should have been a breeze–it was a free camera but the area was a sidewalk with a tiled, multicolored pattern. There were a lot of trees in the background, but as they were far away and I had plenty of floor detail they were disregarded, no problem.
Per all the tutorials I had seen, I was using perspective as my motion model. This would make sense if I were doing a planar track in Mocha, and I don’t really know Blender yet, so I went with it.
After HOURS of tracking, retracking, trying to beat 100±pixel solve errors down to 10, and there being weird pulses in the track even when it showed a good low solve error, I stepped back. I’m used to camera tracking in Nuke, which doesn’t have any motion models for its trackers. It just grabs points and solves based on a point cloud. Figuring this was worth a shot, I used the location track. It was super fast to track and in no time I had a 0.6 solve error.
My guess is–and I’m definitely open to additional instruction/correction here–the non-location tracks are primarily for planar tracks, as they work like Mocha. But I would recommend STARTING with location-model trackers. (I also cranked up correlation to 0.9, and expanded the search area of the tracking points slightly to accommodate some big moves.
Maybe this will help someone else coming from Nuke and scratching their head over why “perspective” seems to cause more trouble than it solves.
I’m not sure what you are suggestion here… blender does have different Motion Models to track footage… and maybe Nuke can do this “automatically”… (IDK). Well it does cost a bit more so they can pay developers to make some automatic solving algorithm and they maybe are also more experienced from the feedback of their clients.
Anyway there are a lot of tutorials about motion tracking in blender and also the best method to use in belnder and also the best methode to do the actual footage…
So even when Nuke “can do this” there is also a reason why special tracking software exits like for example:
But there also have there own setttings which you can tweak or not and so there might be some which are better suited to some use case than others.
So when you say:
i assume that you was “watching” something on the sidewalk with little distance difference to it. Then i gues perspective make no real sense and affine might be better. Location if there is almost scaling and rotation… “going” down to location if this would be a “perfect” look at the sidewalk (like for exampe for some comic animation; same distance so no scale and no rotation becaus of “perfect” camera slide ).
Also: some things does not solve fantastic just because one does use the best application for this… there is always this nasty think called experience.
So take it this way : you learnt something… other can’t tell you about your usecase… me included… you have to experience it…
Exactly, I learned something that was contrary to the tutorials I’ve seen (and based on a lot of experience camera tracking experience in Nuke). The camera in this shot was free-roming, lots of motion in all axes. Perspective was looking for and warping patterns that I don’t think are ultimately used in 3D camera tracks (although ARE used in planar tracks). Using location boiled them down to simple points which were fast to track and great to solve–and thus it worked beautifully, like Nuke, at a fraction of the price.
I am definitely happy to hear when my solution should not be considered, but you were countering with a completely different scenario (with a winky bit of snark).
i may have not completely understood your actual scenario or your intentions… anyway: Multiple times i have experienced a lot of “rants” about not only blender but also about other 3D or any software and those “public thoughts” were mostly not helpfull for anyone… so i might have overreacted a bit. Also the “topic headline” is more provocative than a real question… but you are:
…
Sometimes one simply does not find the “fitting” tutorial… but they are properly there…
…and there is also the awesome forum search function (top right - icon)
Maybe not those do XY in Z minutes videos :
… … but sometimes the platform suggestions on the side are helpfull…
So maybe more something like this Blender VFX Tutorials playlist by Jacob Zirkle (?):
…or simple because (as i meantioned blender is an all free purpose app; nuke is a speicalized payed video app with tracking and there are even payed and very specialized apps for tracking only… ) it’s a free start into the universe of camera tracking…
You seem to think that my point is that Blender is inferior to Nuke as far as camera tracking. My point is that it isn’t (at least in an everyday-use kind of situation), you just need to APPROACH it like Nuke instead of what (most of? I watched a lot) the Blender tutorials say. This was a quick tip for Nuke users to save them having to do the same digging–a pretty decidedly pro-Blender thing (based on extensive experience with other software).
- icon) 
… but sometimes the platform suggestions on the side are helpfull…
