So I recently discovered the Tomato Branch motion capturing feature for Blender and have been giddy with excitement for the possibilities it can produce. However I have a question regarding Tomato Branch, and motion tracking in general. Is it possible to accurately track a shot that rotates 360 degrees around a central focal point?
Yes, it is. And you don’t need Tomato - get the latest stable and official release of Blender and follow this tutorial by Andrew Price. 
Sweet thanks. I’ll definitely check that out when I get the chance.
Is it possible to accurately track a shot that rotates 360 degrees around a central focal point?
That tutorial does not have a camera just rotation around a focal point. You need some camera movement in addition to just camera rotation.
Exactly, it’s not possible to track a scene with a 360 turn shot of a tripod, you need camera movement creating parallax in all three axes to track a shot in 3D.
Then what do 3D tracking features such as those in PFTrack or Autodesk Matchmover do? Or do you need multiple shots? Or am I completely off in my understanding somewhere…? Sorry I’m new to integrating objects with film.
Blender currently does not have capability. It does not mean other software solutions do not either.
Camera motion solving
Despite that there’s no difference in solving camera motion and object motion from math’s point of view, only camera solving is currently supported. And it’s still have got some limitations, like unsupported solve of tripod motions or dominant plane motions (where all trackable features belong to one plane). It’s planned to solve these limitations in the future.
Alright I think I’m set for now. Thanks guys.
Sorry I should have specified. I was wondering if it was possible with tracking software in general.
Hmm, first, I’m no math guy, but I’m pretty shure this is a math problem and that, as I remember it, you can’t track 3D from a single camera position as a tripod, you actually need camera movement in all three axes… I cannot guarantee I’m righ here, but I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.
About how it’s done in the movies/TV; Well, they never use tripods, hehe - or at least it’s very uncommon. You use dollies and cranes and/or steadicams. These give enough parallaxing for 3D tracking. There’s also a lot of 2D tracking in compositing and in many cases a 2D track is enough, especially for virtual sets & such…
Also, you don’t need to 3D-track to integrate 3D on filmed plates. Look at Starship Troopers where the whole movie is actually matchmove’d manually in Softimage 3.7… Crazy stüff… :eek:
It’s called nodal matchmoving when the camera is mounted on a tripod. It’s pretty common, but Blender doesn’t yet have a mode for solving it. (well, not that I’m aware of, anyway.)
http://tinyurl.com/7mlsr8y
http://www.aipvfx.com/index.php?topic=23.0