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Optical Flares 3D tracker problem
Hey there, I’m trying to get optical flares working with 3D Tracker Camera in After Effects, but it never seems to work. I track the footage with 3D Tracker Camera, select some points and make a null that sticks to the footage perfectly. Yet when I turn an optical flare 3D it just jitters all over the place and doesn’t remotely follow the null. What gives ? I’ve also tried parenting the position of the flare to the null but that never seems to work either, and turning the optical flare’s layer 3D. Any suggestions?
I’ve attached a link to a video highlighting the problem: https://youtu.be/er28Uk342p8
Many thanks to everyone who reads this 🙂
Josh
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6 Replies
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The camera tracker in AE creates a real huge z-space normally, check out this tutorial on Orient World, that will explain the problem.
Basically your lens flare isn’t anywhere near the null right now in z-space. One method would be to crreate your null, then create a light. Parent the light to the null and 0 out the light’s position. Now it should be where the null is, now just use optical flares and tell it to use 3D lights.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
Hey, thank you for the help. I’ve managed to successfully track the light to the null, but when I set my optical flare to Track Lights, it disappears, I can’t seem to find it anywhere!
I’ve attached another video if you could take a quick look, thanks 🙂 -
When your light get’s really far back, optical flares react as if they were far away, so they become incredibly small—check out my example project below. One, you can disable 3D perspective, I’m not sure how that will effect your project. You probably can compensate by adjusting the size of flare. Then there is that tutorial link I sent you before to Orient World. When you select a point, plane with orient world, it makes it the 0,0,0 coordinate and resizes everything that the camera tracker did, so you can work with less crazy numbers.
The Orient World script just automates(and a whole lot more) the process that Andrew Kramer uses in this tutorial, so if you want you can manually do all of this for free: 131. 3D Truck Composite. He covers this idea in the first part of the tutorial, and really gets into around 3:30
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
Thank you so much! I tried it on a few clips and that seems to be the case as far as I’m concerned. One thing I’m having a problem with is getting a certain optical flare to track a certain light, I was wondering how I could get, for example, Light 1 to be a blue optical flare, and Light 2 to be a red optical flare, as if I just set track lights to both optical flares then it kind of combines the red and blue optical flare to both sets of Lights. Any suggestions 🙂 ? many many thanks!
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To track separate flares onto separate lights all you have to do is change the “name starts with” feature under the track lights option to a letter like “A” then name all flares you want blue “A” or “A2” or whatever. Then duplicate your optical flares layer and change the name starts with to “B.” Change the flare that is loaded onto that new layer to the other red one you want, then all you have to do is change name of any light that you want to be red to “B” or “B2” and so on.
Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer
thinkck.com
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Very much appreciated, you guys are seriously great. Hopefully anyone with similar problems will find this thread, thanks a bunch!
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