Why I am using CG....

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

I just found this link on insidecg. it’s a FREE cameratracking utillity.
I began using CG because I was very interested in compositing. this program would fullfills this dream. anyone wanna write an importer? :smiley:

http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/icarus/index.php

Roel

<edit>
I tried it out…and IT ROCKS!
i’m not a python wizard. but I don’t see why python an not use this data: http://home.wanadoo.nl/spruit.haag/Stuff/test.txt

that’s a fle containing camera movement, rotation, translation. all that.
</edit>

#2

That looks really good! I just installed it too, although it seems it was installed wrong the first time. I’ll see if I can write a quick importer, should only take an hour or so, although I’m not sure about all the data.

#3

I just sent an e-mail to the makers to see if I can get specifications for the file format or something. also is doesnt do any harm to be mentioned on their site :slight_smile:

after all, not everybody can afford lightwave

#4

Great link
I want the linux version :x

Q. Is there a Linux version available?
A. We do have a Linux version (in fact, all the software was originally developed under Linux and then ported to SGI and Windows). Unfortunately, the Linux version requires a 3rd party library to play video files, and it is unclear if this library has been released under the GPL or LGPL licenses (the distribution contain a mixture of both licenses). Until we know that the 3rd party library is definitely all LGPL, we can’t release the Linux version without also releasing all our source code under the terms of the GPL. We will try to either clarifify the licensing terms, or find an alternative library to use.

:x :x :x

#5

Well, I got something now, but it only handles rotation & location, but I’m not sure if I got it correct, I used your file as a test. I assumed the rotation values to be a matrix, but I would have to see the original if it is correct. I’ll see if I can create something quickly to test it more thoroughly, but besides rotation & location, camera lens values will have to be set I think, and I’m not sure how the values in the file relate to the Blender camera. More later today I hope…

#6

Hmm, small correction for the whole community at this point - since Blender will be FREE as in FREE SPEECH (and not as in free beer - see http://www.fsf.org/ ), you might have to specify what kind of free you mean.

The tool you pointed at is not free in my sense.

  1. There’s no source code available, so I can’t modify (freedom 1) it and I also can’t redistribute these modifications (since I wasn’t able to make them in the first place, and the license wouldn’t permit it anyway - freedom 3).

  2. It only runs on Windows, which isn’t really such a problem, but Windows itself is completely proprietary and I can’t use it - I would have to use a proprietary operating system to use a free software program. (If it was free software.)

  3. It is available for “non-commercial” use only. I’m actually personally completely against these non-commercial use only offerings, since this doesn’t make the software available to its full potential. Look at Blender - it will be free and will be used in commercial environments. We (the Blender community and developers) won’t loose anything by that - in fact, we rather profit from even more people being able to find bugs and making other contributions. So this restricts even freedom 0, but also freedom 3.

That said, yes, Icarus is free (in the sense of gratis), but it is also non-free (because it doesn’t give me the freedoms I want - see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for the four freedoms of free software). The link also gives you an idea what these “freedoms 0-3” mean in every detail.

Felix

#7

okok

I think of something when being free when I can download it and use it. I’m not yet using CG in Professional work so I don’t worry about commercial licenses

#8

I can’t get much further now, I get something resembling the original motion but seemingly much more exaggerated, location is ok, rotation is not. When you have more info on what the data actually represents, let me know, or maybe anyone else can figure it…

#9

I think the whole ‘free’ software thing kind of sucks.

people, refer to free as gratis or free of charge, thus in my opinion the same could, and should apply to software.

Better ways to describe the so called ‘free’ software, thus the right to make changes and redistribute those. in my opinion are ‘public’, ‘gnu’ etc.

#10

And back to the subject.

I think this is cool software.
Too bad that aughey has never released the software he was working on. Asfar as I can remember he had the camera tracker and python importer ready.

#11

Yes, he had, but the python API wan’t quite what he needed as far as I understood, he was waiting for it to be updated, just before NaN’s bankruptcy he was looking for testers…

#12

I think it’s great that people such as Icarus release free for non-commercial use software. It allows talented people who would normally not have access to the means of production, such as camera tracking, to experiment and learn without having to spend a fortune on film and animation school and software.

#13

As a volunteer of both the Blender and the GNU Project, I could take this as a direct insult! I provided many links explaining what Free Software is about and you obviously did not want to follow them to understand what my ethical background is and why I help the Blender Foundation, after all! But I actually don’t intend to start a flamewar here myself.

The point here is that I exaggerated a bit with the word “free” if applied outside the “Free Software” context (it wasn’t so far outside that context, but it was), but you also find other good words and phrases for it if you mean gratis, but not if you speak about freedom. Especially if you speak about what the term “Free Software” exactly represents.

Now, would you accept this deal?

I hereby apologize for having offended both you and Goofster, and will try to tighten my “Free Software” context a bit. On the other hand, please accept that I’m not against anybody personally on this forum (yet), but that I’m against proprietary software and have various (among them ethical) reasons to reject it. (I already stated elsewhere what’s the matter with Blender.) I accept people who use it, but it is very difficult for me to accept them promoting it.

If you didn’t see it until now - I enabled graphical smileys in this post - there’s no single smiley here. This is something I take very seriously. And others do too, so accept my apologies and stop being a near-racist.

Felix

#14

I’m sick of it too – the term ‘free’ has been used to describe
things which are free of charge long before Richard Stallman
et al latched on to it. Open source followers should either pick
a new word or grow thicker skins.

Chris

#15

The word free is being overused anyway.
How about “25% free!”, for some reason they never want to give me those 25 % :wink:

For me as a non comercial, non programming (the kinds of programming I do don’t count in this case) entity it doesn’t really matter in what way a program is free as long as it’s good :stuck_out_tongue:

  1. pofo
#16

Ehm,… if you take something like that as an insult than I think you’re totally overreacting. I know what ‘free’ software is about. And what I am pointing out is not that the whole concept isn’t good. Just the the term ‘free’ shouldn’t describe it. Since EVERYONE ELSE refers to free as without charge.
I can imagine now being in a store:
Clerk: “yes sir this is free software, that will be $100”
Sir: “WTF? but you said free”
Clerk: “yes but I didn’t mean as in free beer”
Sir: “WTF? are you stoned?”
Clerk: “Hey you can make changes and redistribute those, that means free”
Sir: “Last I heared free was without Charge”
Clerk: “You insult me”

I would have loved to, if not for:

Now personally I think that opensource / gnu software is fantastic. I am a software engineering student myself, and know that it’s just a great resource to learn from.
But I do not feel at all that software needs to be free, or that you even need access to the sourcecodes. And yes I do understand that your principles about this are different than mine.
But I do think that you have to realize that opensource / gnu software has a fairly limited audience. Thus I think it’s a bit arrogant to claim a term like ‘free software’. If this makes me a near-racist in your opinion, than I really don’t care about your opinion.

Greetings,
Timothy

p.s.
I do think it’s great that you are volunteering for both the Blender Foundation as the GNU project.

#17

strange how these threads can go a different way then the original post :smiley:

here is the e-mail from ICARUS:

Hi Roel,

Writing a blender import script would be a great idea. The text format is
very simple:

Frame number
Translation X Y Z
3x3 rotation matrix
Camera focal length (in pixels)
Pixel aspect ratio
Camera skew
Camera principal point (in pixels)

I have no experience with Blender, so I don’t know what sort of camera model
it uses, but you can probably ignore the skew and principal point (like we do
with the Lightwave export). One problem might be getting the rotation matrix
into a format that Blender can use.

If the Blender scene format is simple, we could also write an export filter
for ICARUS. Is there any on-line documentation about the format?

Simon

now, this is where my python knowledge ends :slight_smile:

I’m not sure if the blender file format will be open too after the opensourcing…

anyone wanna contact this guy?
his e-mail is: [email protected]

please mention my name too, so he knows what it’s about.

Roel

#18

Well, that is exactly how I interpreted the data, but I don’t get the results I would have expected, I guess I am interpreting the rotation matrix wrong. The motion I get in Blender is much more exaggerated.

#19

Could it be that the matrix is inverted (in collumns instead of rows)?

or maybe I just said something stupid :stuck_out_tongue:

Martin

#20

Of course I already thought of that, and I do get a better result by using the transposed matrix, but still not quite what I would expect.