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[pellepixel]

Hi
To learn SynthEyes I am using 3DS max animations with known coordinates to simulate real footage.
Right now simulating a aerial short shot, where I fly over a lake area with ice and in over a quite steep scoreline. The solution come up fine. But I can not find a perfect way to rotate and adjust the whole scene by using the fact that the ice is flat. I would like to use some soft constrains - for example "seed and lock" all ice tracks to "any xy-plane" but the camera do not follow right ... it will not follow and rotate/flip right.
Is it possible? Like the way you picking and adjusting the camera in the manual "Whole"-manner, but with higher precision.
Everything works right if I seed three or more track points giving them real (3DS max) scene coordinates.
I will in fact use this method on a similar real shot were I want to extract the score ground to a 3D-mesh. Use SynthEyes as a 3D-scanner. I only have the ice and just a few known XY coordiantes and want high precision.

Another question- Is there a shortcut to fit the scene to the screen viewports?

[GraphicsKid]

You can't just say that some points are on the xy plane. That doesn't give syntheyes a sense of scale. You have to give it some hard coordinates to work with. That's what that *3 button does. The first 3d point you click becomes the origin, the second becomes (20,0,0) and the third becomes "on xy plane".

[pellepixel]

Thanks for quick answer.. I like that.. when I spend so much time exploring and get stucked.. I know the 3 points technique .. but when I have a lot of points on a surface I want to take advantage of a weighted average... to be able to get a more reliable measurement on the meshed scoreline besides. The precision decrease with so few points.
There are no other methods?
The best so far is just adjusting manually, looking at the point clouds from the sides. But do I get any advantage to let syntheyes do the last minor adjustment to the xy-plane? Or maybe it is possible to get three more reliable orientation-points from three different parts of the point cloud that I can use to make the 3-points orientation from?

[GraphicsKid]

You can set one to "on X" and have a bunch more set to "On XY plane".

Also, there's other ways to align the camera. If there are straight 90 degree edges in your scene, you can align using axes lines drawn on. Go to the lens panel, and click "Add Line". Now draw lines that line up with edges of objects, ie the corner of a building would be the Z axis. You need at least 2 axes, and I'd recommend at least 3 lines per, but it'll work with just 1 line for each axis. Once you've drawn the lines, click "Align!". If that gives weird results, Control+Click it and it'll cycle through a bunch of different solutions that also match your drawn lines, and you just pick the one that works out best.

[pellepixel]

Thanks again.. do not feel so alone with you answering..

Tried your tip, setting every tracker on the "ice" in the front to xy-plane and one to "on x".. but still the camera and the scene will not follow. My camera is "flying" at the same altitude.
You can see on the enclosed screen dump. Tried with both to set them as a seed and without (i e just set them to the plane - but same result.
I also enlosed a shot from the real aerial video I will work on later. Plan to make a precise mesh of the land where the house is and down to the water.

www.flickr.com/photos/perpixel/5344120942/
Will continue to test tomorrow.
Got mail from Russ that said there are several ways as from the manual (that I have tried to read and understand)

[GraphicsKid]

You sure there's enough perspective in this shot for a good 3d solve?

[pellepixel]

yes I used a max animation that went along and over quite a long distance ... you can see the blue camera path and got lesser than 0.2% error. I will try more tomorrow and come back again.. thanks. Late in Sweden. Per