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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Motion Tracking a character on to a moving object.

  • Motion Tracking a character on to a moving object.

    Posted by Rob Tyler on June 25, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    Hi there!

    as the title suggests, I have a 2D animated character that i would like to track on to a moving object in my scene. The camera is also panning which brings the problem of perspective in to the picture! When the moving object is to the left of the frame it is ever so slightly further away than when it is in the middle.

    I am supplying a screen shot to hopefully better illustrate what im trying to achieve. The boxes are being pushed from left side of frame to right. The character needs to sit on the boxes.

    I have tried using the built in tracker within after effects but with limited success. I have also tried mocha. Mocha seems to give me a solid track which is great but I dont understand how I can apply my animated character to the tracking data as corner pin isnt really appropriate. I though I could just track the side surface of the box, and go from there :/

    I dont know if I have been clear here but any help would be great! (I have done tones of tutorials on tracking with mocha etc but they all seem geared towards things like screen replacement etc.

    many thanks!

    After effects cc 2014
    mac book pro
    intel i7
    16GB RAM
    Nvidia card

    Rob Tyler replied 12 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Michael Szalapski

    June 26, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    The basic AE motion tracking or Mocha should both work really well for that shot. Simply apply tracking data to a null object and parent your character to the null.

    This resource has a lot of good information and links to tutorials that should help you.

    – The Great Szalam
    (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

    No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

  • Rob Tyler

    June 26, 2014 at 6:10 pm

    Cheers mate, for some reason I wasnt getting a good track from AE, after playing around with some more settings in Mocha and choosing to copy the tracking data to AE as translation data i managed to get a good clean track and then just had to move my characters anchor point around a bit.

    Cheers.

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