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SynthEyes offers three specific exporters for Shake, plus one generic one:
1. MatchMove Node.
2. Tracker Node
3. Tracking File format
4. 3-D Export via the “AfterFX via .ma” or Maya ASCII exports.
The first two formats (Sizzle export scripts) produce shake scripts (.shk files); the third format is a text file. The fourth option produces Maya scene files that Shake reads and builds into a scene using its 3-D camera.
We’ll start with the simplest, the tracking file format. Select one tracker and export with the Shake Tracking File Format, and you will have a track that can be loaded into a Shake tracker using the load option. You can use this to bring a track from SynthEyes into existing Shake tracking setups.
Building on this basis, #2, Tracker Node, exports one or more selected trackers from SynthEyes to create a single Tracker Node within Shake. There are some fine points to this. First, you will be asked whether you want to export the solved 3-D positions, or the tracked 2-D positions. These values are similar, but not the same. If you have a 3-D solution in SynthEyes, you can select the solved 3-D positions, and the export will be the “ideal” tracked (predicted) coordinates, with less jitter than the plain 2- D coordinates.
Also, since you might be exporting from Windows to a Mac or Linux machine, the image source file(s) may be named differently: perhaps X:\shots1\shot1_#.tga on Windows, and /Users/tom/shots/shot1_#.tga on the Mac. The Shake export script’s dialog box has two fields, PC Drive and Mac Drive, that you can set to automatically translate the PC file name into the Mac file name, so that the Shake script will work immediately. In this example, you would set PC Drive to “X:\\” and Mac Drive to “/Users/tom/”.
Finally, the MatchMove node exporter looks not for trackers to export, but for SynthEyes planes! Each plane (created from the 3-D panel) is exported to Shake by creating four artificial trackers (in Shake) at the corners of the plane. The matchmove export lets you insert a layer at any arbitrary position within the 3-D environment calculated by SynthEyes. For example, you can insert a matte painting into a scene at a location where there is nothing to track. You can use a collection of planes, positioned in SynthEyes, to obtain much of the effect of a 3-D camera. The matchmove node export also provides Windows to Mac/Linux file name translation.
©2024 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.