Finally my new official Blender Foundation training DVD “Track, Match, Blend” is shipping! It took a little bit longer than expected, but here it is!

It contains around 10 hours of training for Blender’s Motiontracking module. It covers everything from simple 2D-Tracking, image stabilization and setting up a classic 4-corner-pin-shot to advanced camera- and object-tracking, including face-deformation and marker-removal. Here’s a link to the content page of the DVD: http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/images/TrackMatchBlend_Previewsite/

Watch the trailer! And then buy the DVD! :)

The development of Blender’s matchmoving module keeps on being amazing.
After adding some new algorithms for feature-tracking, which allow to accurately track insane amounts of motion-blur, now we also got object-tracking.
In principle object-tracking is very similar to camera-tracking, it’s just that the movements have to be kinda inverted, so that you don’t have a moving camera, but a moving object. The challenge is to integrate a moving object into a shot with a moving camera. Luckily Sergey Sharybin took this challenge within a week and gave us intuitive and powerful object tracking in Blender.
Below you find one of my first tests with it, and also a link to a tutorial on blendercookie.com.

This weekend I received mind-blowing and awesome news.
I will work on the Blender Foundation’s next Open Movie, called Project Mango!
That means I will be in Amsterdam the first half of 2012, doing modeling, tracking, animation, compositing and whatever comes along.

Project Mango will be a VFX short movie, shot in Amsterdam. This time the Open Movie will be all SciFi, with giant robots destroying Amsterdam, or whatever crazy idea the director Ian Hubert comes up with. But it will be awesome, as he is the director and vfx-guy of Project London.
The goal of Project Mango is not only to create about 4 minutes of high-quality 4k VFX shots, filmed with a RED (or similar), but also to improve several areas of Blender:
- Matchmoving
- Photorealistic GPU-Rendering
- openCL accelerated and improved compositor

Btw., I already had some fun with Amsterdam:

I’m so excited. Very interesting times ahead.

Here’s a new video of a blender compositing/tracking workflow. The tracker interface has been cleaned up a lot, so it’s even better now.

A little quickie from today:
Ever since we have a pingpong table in the office, work has become even more fun!
Of course I couldn’t resist and tried blender’s camera tracker on it.
So here’s a little tribute to a famous scene from Forest Gump:

Matchmoving, animating, compositing, editing and sound design has been done in Blender.
Thanks Johan for the great performance!
:)

Here’s a demo of the current tracking workflow in Blender.
Though I have to admit that it is already outdated. In the last 3 days a lot of new features have been added. That’s why there is also a tutorial below. But even that is outdated! :D If Sergey continues like that we have a fully mature tracker in a few days. Though even this one is already pretty stable and usable!

Here’s a tutorial for the tracker: http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/07/14/gsoc-tomato-branch-camera-tracking/

Hey!
I am happy to announce a new video tutorial at www.cmiVFX.com.

This time it’s all about camera-tracking with Syntheyes.

There will also be a second part for this tutorial coming out in september, that will build upon this tutorial, and that will be Compositing 3D into real life footage with Blender. That upcoming tutorial will use the tracking-data and footage that is also used in this tutorial.
So anybody interested in that might want to head over to http://www.cmivfx.com/productpages/product.aspx?name=Syntheyes_Complete_Training and check it out.

Special bonus for all the Blender users: If you use “Blender3D30″ for the coupon code at the store you will get 30% off. That offer will expire on september 1st.

Here’s the official press release:
(more…)

Hey!
Very long time no post, I know. But we are or have been all in very time-consuming projects, so there is no chance to post anything on our poor lonely blog ;-)
But that has just changed! Because the project I have been working on is finally over, the last changes been finished and everyone is happy. Maybe I can write something about it in the future.
One part of my job has been to do Camera-Tracking with Syntheyes, then preparing the 3D-scenes in Blender, then exporting to Maya (yikes!) and from there to Toxik. And while I have been doing a lot of work in Toxik in the end, the most fun-part has been the combination of Syntheyes and Blender. Since then I absolutely love camera-tracking, especially with Syntheyes and Blender, just because it is so quick and easy.
So I though I’d do a quick demo of the workflow.
If I had a better camera, more time and better ideas, I’d do a little short-movie, but this time it’s just a quick demo :-)
Oh, btw, it includes a little piggy named “Klaus”, which is part of another project, and which I put in here just for fun.