Shadow and reflection on floor layer

[Robert Mcgowan]

Hi Brent
thats a great piece of tracking , very smooth!
Do you wanna do a tutorial on it ?

My film should be public now, yes please take a look and let me know your thoughts

Thanks
Robert

[Edward Wu]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for posting the video. I was able to take a look at it and see what you are running into. As Brent mentioned, there are two ways to go about this. You can go with either ways and it will get the look that you want.

The method that Brent mentioned lets you use parenting to quickly attach the text to the table that you are working with. However, the down side to working with this method is that when you are using external parenting, you do not see the results of where the object ends up position-wise. This can cause confusion and frustration as shown in your video since your text jumps in position and it can be hard to wrap your head around where the text is. One thing that I did notice in your video is that you were re-positioning your Null and applying rotation but not seeing the change in the After Effects Comp. Keep in mind that you have to click on the “Update Tracking” button when working with external trackers. Any time you make adjustments to the tracker layer you are working with, you will need to update the tracking. Once you click on the update button, your text will change in position. Then, as Brent mentioned, simply go into the ProAnimator Set-Up window and adjust the size to the Pose, such as increasing the scale to 1500% as Brent mentioned. This may help with what you are currently struggling with since you just need to change the position of the Null in the After Effects Comp, then change the size in the Set-Up window.

The second method is to simply set ProAnimator to use the Comp Camera. Then, go into the ProAnimator Set-Up window and make adjustments to the text. This method may be easier in some regards because the position/size/rotation of the text you see in ProAnimator is exactly what you see in the After Effects Comp. It may be much easier for you to set up the position/size/rotation of the text in ProAnimator since everything relates better to what you are seeing in the After Effects Comp. You may need to make a few adjustments to get the text to sit exactly where you need it to sit, but this may be a more visual approach to lining up the text since you are able to see all the adjustments line up exactly as you see in After Effects.

Hope this helps. If you’re still having problems, please send the project file to me at ed@zaxwerks.com. I’d love to guide you through the steps and get you up and running.

Best,
Edward

[Edward Wu]

For anyone interested in this topic, what helped Robert out the most was setting up the text inside ProAnimator so he can see where his text is in relations to the footage. To do this, we had to first set the ProAnimator layer to use the Comp Camera. Then, jot down the coordinates of the layer you are trying to match. Using Robert’s example project, the layer he was trying to match had position values of 959, 554, and -6773.5.

The most important value is the Z Position. If the Z Position is off, then the object will not match up with the camera at all.

Go into the ProAnimator Set-Up window, create the 3D Text and go into the Pose Controls. Then, set the Z value. Note that the Z value is -6773.5. However, in ProAnimator we will need to set the value 6773.5 instead of -6773.5. After doing this, the text will be sitting relatively close to the layer we are trying to track. Then, we just need to tweak the Y value to get the text to sit on the table.

This was a method that Robert liked because when using the Editor Background feature, it provides a nice visual cue as to where the text is sitting in regards to the footage. Hope this helps anyone who is working on tracking text/logos to a moving footage. Have fun!

Best,
Edward