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Line Trails Stuck To The Ground
ive been given a brief recently which has given me quite a bit of grief in the past. it seems easy on the surface, but have always found it very time consuming, I think I’ve been going about it in the wrong way all along.
So one of my clients is a race car brand, and they often give me long shots where the cam is following a car, and I need to put trails behind it, which are left on the ground behind it and stay there afterwards for the duration of the shot.
So I’ve been doing it with paths, going towards the end of the clip, and seeing where the dirt trails are that the car has left, putting the paths with the pen tool, then manually keyframing those points every 10 frames to make sure things stay stuck to the ground ( I do this by looking at identifiable pieces of the ground and making sure points are close to them at all times).
I know this sounds insane, and it kinda is, but I had to resort to doing this because 3D camera tracking these shots just isn’t working for me. The path always ends up jittering, often the path will be really solid in one location, then for example in the distance it’ll be jittering a lot. I think this is because they’re long clips and the path is in view throughout?
If 3D paths were a thing in AE this would be a lot easier for me as I’d be able to map the points a lot easier, but as it stands it’s a bit of a nightmare.
Oh also, I’ve tried points to nulls, but it means I can’t then edit the bezier curves at all, which I need to do.
Can anyone suggest another workflow for this? Even another software? Plugins etc?
Thanks a lot.
Rob
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6 Replies
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hey Robert, the solution is simpler than you imagine but it requires knowing a specific trick you don’t find online, send me the footage and i’ll create a custom tutorial with the solution, talk soon bro!
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Hi there John,
thanks for getting in touch.
I can’t share exact footage due to NDAs, but Pexels has some really similar stuff (albeit on a track, not dirt), but these are all moving shots with moving cars.
https://www.pexels.com/video/aerial-footage-of-a-race-track-3774757/
https://www.pexels.com/video/car-tires-competition-smoke-4568863/
https://www.pexels.com/video/cars-on-race-track-3772662/Thanks for helping out.
R
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If you have things in the shot that are moving, that makes it hard too. Mask out the car, dust in the air, etc. in a precomp so that just the ground and maybe buildings and whatnot are in the shot and try tracking that.
If you have a wide angle lens on the camera, getting a solid camera track can be tricky. I usually use Red Giant’s Lens Distortion Matcher on shots and then track the undistorted footage – tends to be a more solid track that way. AND whatever you put in the undistorted comp gets redistorted back onto the footage for much more realism.
Any time I’m messing with a 3D camera track, I use the free Normalize Track script to bring things into a sensible space.
As far as plugins go to make the trail, you can do it by animating an AE light to follow the car and then using either Trapcode Particular or TAO (both from Red Giant) to create a trail based on the movement of the light.
If you want to do it natively, you could try CC Particle World or something, but I’ve never enjoyed working with that. You could actually do it with a regular mask on a solid and use the mask paths follow nulls script and make the nulls 3D and put them in the scene based on nulls you generate from the camera track. It wouldn’t really be 3D, but it would have the illusion in a way.
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Here’s the custom tutorial for you Robert, enjoy! i hope you appreciate the help! https://youtu.be/WILSuLuWfAE
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Thank you very much, John Martin. The tutorial is very good
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