Avoid Constraint Overkill

Avoid Constraint Overkill

To recap and quickly give a word of warning, keep your coordinate system constraints as simple as possible, whether they are on trackers or camera path. It is a common novice error to assign as many constraints as possible to things that are remotely near the floor, a wall, the ceiling, etc, in the mistaken belief that the constraints will rescue some bad tracking, or cure a distorted lens.

Consequently, the first thing we do with problematic scene files in SynthEyes technical support is to remove all the customer's constraints, re-solve, and look at the tracker graphs to locate bad tracks, which we usually delete. Presto, very often the scene is now fine.

Stick with the recommended 3-point method until you have a decent understanding of tracking, and a clear idea of why doing something else is necessary to achieve the size, positioning, and orientation you need.

If you have a shot with no physical camera translation—a nodal tripod shot—do not waste time trying to do a 3-D solve and coordinate system alignment. Many of the shots we see with “I can’t get a coordinate system alignment” are tripod shots erroneously being solved as full 3-D shots. Set the solver to tripod mode, get a tripod solution, and use the line alignment tool to set up coordinates.