Blender Cookie - 2D Tracking and Compositing in Blender

Learn Fundamental Skills Needed For Compositing

For a compositor, tracking is one of the most fundamental skills you can have. Everything depends on it, from rotoscoping and adding in simple things like lens flares, to more complex things like removing objects from a scene and advanced corner pinning. In this series, we?re going to explore how you can use tracking, not as a 3D artist, but as a 2D compositor in Blender. We?ll go through the different types of tracks and, using a variety of different examples, demonstrate how these techniques could be used in a real world scenario. A working knowledge of Blender?s 3D functions is expected for this series.

Tracking and Compositing Tools

First we?ll take a look at Blender?s tracking tools and make sure you understand how they work and what is happening as you track live-action footage.

Single Point Tracking

Then we?ll look at few examples of single point tracking, using it to paste a decal to a wall, remove a car from a parking lot, and easily remove tracking markers from a woman?s face.

Offset Tracking

After that, we?ll cover offset tracking. How to track objects that go off-screen or are obscured by foreground objects.

Two point Tracking

Next up, we?ll put a brand new moon in our sky using two point tracking. Two point tracking is used for tracking scale and rotation in addition to position.

Four Point, Plane Tracking

And lastly, we?ll go over the brand new Plane Track tool to help us achieve unbelievably easy corner pins. However, the old techniques of performing a corner pin aren?t obsolete yet, and we?ll explain why.

Related videos

In part five, on Four Point Tracking, we demo the new Plane Track tool that?s currently in development. It will be integrated into Blender soon, but for the time being you can access it via the Tomato Development Branch, linked below. Additionally, if you are interested in further tracking and compositing we recommend checking out Track Match Blender from Sebastian Koenig.

Download the Tomato Development branch from Graphicall: