One of the great features in Adobe After Effects CS6 is its built-in 3D camera tracker, which helps realistically integrate CG elements into footage that have a fair amount of camera or subject movement. But what if you want to do a 3D match move shot, and you can't afford a copy of After Effects? Not a problem. Andrew Price of Blender Guru has a great hour-long video to get you started with 3D tracking and compositing CG elements in the free open source 3D program, Blender:
Granted, this method is slower than using the After Effects 3D motion tracker, due to Blender's lack of ability to automatically set up accurate track points. But it does give you a good foundation on how to accomplish an accurate track yourself, while also giving you the modeling, material, and lighting tools to better integrate your CG elements, all in one free program. If you're interested in learning more about modeling and texturing 3D objects to put in your tracked scenes, be sure to check out the Blender tutorial videos in my post on creating content for Element 3D.
Links:
- Blender Guru: Introduction to Camera Tracking
- Blender.org
