With my time at Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) coming to an end (for now?) and having seen how some things are done in production in a real studio, I've looked at how my own production processes might benefit from having a couple of handy tools to help with the workflow.
One tool I thought was handy, was a quick and easy button to place upside down cones on tracking markers. In post-production houses, they use tracking cone passes as a way for senior team staff (leads, supervisors) to check on how tracking for a particular shot is coming out. Cones are a useful display mechanism here, because they can 'pin-point' the location of your tracking marker.
Though the output itself doesn't contribute to the production, it's a useful QA tool they use to check on the quality of the track. And with tracking being one of the foundations of integrating CG elements into plates, it's a must to get the camera tracking right as much as possible. And hence, they use a cones pass to see how the tracking camera calculation has turned out.
So, I put my mind to making a simple cones plugin generator that puts cones onto tracking locators (null objects in CInema4D). Here's a video showing two results, one on synthetic data to test, and another showing the results of a track I did at RSP on an ActionVFX shot.
Link to the free shot here: ActionVFX shot 8.
The plugin seems to do its thing pretty well for the intended use. Below is some of the description text, which will help to explain a couple of things a little more:
The plugin comes with a few adjustable attributes. The user can set the colour, width, height, number of segments and the scale of the cones. There is also the ability to change the scale of the markers as the distance falls off. This helps to keep distant markers scaled enough to bring back those in the far distance that may be too small to see properly. The plugin can also orient the cones to an object. So, if you've tracked a car and the car flips upside down, and you know the orientation of the car as an object (through matchmoving the car or some other means), the cones can rotate with the car independently of the general scene track markers. You can see this happening in the second of the synthetic tests with the blue cones. For the real world example - the tracking was done in 3DEqualizer on free 'practice' footage from ActionVFX (link to original footage above). There are ~226 markers, which have all be manually tracked across the frame range. For this video an undistorted version of the plate is shown. The plugin was written in C++ for speed, with the idea to use it as a means to process a tracking cones pass to show production leads and supervisors.
I'm looking into making a second plugin, another useful one to help with building scene geo for tracked shots. If I manage this, I'll post more about it soon.