Building 3D shapes on drone footage

Hello fellow night workers,

I am making a drone film about a building development. I need to draw 3d shapes of buildings in to the 4K drone footage. I can´t really find any good tutorials about how to do this. Any tips about finding tutorials would be very helpful, or better yet any tips on how to do this. I have worked in Motion 5 quite some time but this is a little little bit beyond me.

//H

So you want to composite finished buildings where buildings are not yet finished. Is that it? OK, couple ways to do this. Go find some free or cheap 3D building models online. I always mention Turbo-Squid since they're here in my home town and I used to know someone working for them. But shop around. Then you can use mObject from MotionVFX to place and keyframe the movements to match your drone flight.

Or, you can simply build them in Motion. Make a 3D group, add a camera, then make each side a plain, flat rectangle. Match them together. Maybe place a photo of building texture on them. Then keyframe the movement of that Group it is inside of to match your drone flight path.

Yes that is correct, I might however only use simple cubes to show where the buildings are intended to be as the design is not ready. Unfortunately Turbo-Squid did not have any 3D objects that work in motion 5, but I will look around if I go that way. I did try to import a simple 3D cube to see if it would work, But I can´t seem to figure out how to do this. The cube ends up in 3D space in front of the footage and I can´t move anything without moving the footage as well.

"Unfortunately Turbo-Squid did not have any 3D objects that work in motion 5"

No, they only work with the mObject plugin from MotionVFX, as I stated. Then you get to use them in 3D space inside of Motion.

Be sure your footage is in a separate Group from your "cube", which should be in its own Group by itself. Then move the cube's Group. The footage, being in a different, unrelated Group, will not be affected.

Also, be sure the cube's Group is a 3D Group. The Group with your video clip can stay in a 2D group if desired, or in a 3D Group if there's something about that which helps overall.

I wonder if you could use a simple Period character and make it 3D?
Otherwise, Motion really isn't the application I'd use for this.

My workflow would be to use a 3D tracking software like Syntheyes. Or Mocha, which is 2.5D. Then take the tracking date into any 3D software package (Blender, it's free). Then render out the cubes using the 4K footage as the environment, but don't make the footage visible in the render. You only need the footage to light the 3D scene.
Bring the image sequence of the cubes into motion and composite it over the 4K drone footage and everything should line up and be good to go. Maybe do some color correcting.

BUT if you don't know any 3D software, then try my first suggestion. However, you will still need a better tracker than what Motion has built in. You can get decent results with it though.

It looks as though Mocha now has a 3D camera solver...so it's moved up from being 2.5D to 3D

OH you can do that with manual keyframes in Motion really fast and easy. Unless they need realistic buildings, I'd not bother with 3D modeling apps and all that tracking.

I have really tried that now for a while, and it is just not working doing manual keyframes, the shapes does not stay in place. To do so I have to keyframe every frame and there is 5 min of footage to cover.

So how complex is the movement in this footage?

I did a quick Google search to see if I could find a good tutorial/article on key framing...just in case anyone wanted pro-level techniques. Maybe you already know and if so, this is here for beginners.

This article is more towards 3D animation, but many of the principals apply: www.creativebloq.com/animation/basics-keyframes-tips-61515485

I also found this (which I plan to read right after I post this): help.apple.com/motion/mac/5.0/en/motion/...tion=14%26tasks=true
help.apple.com/motion/mac/5.0/en/motion/...tion=14%26tasks=true

And my two cents from what I learned in school, which really helped me..of course, if your footage is shaky, then this may not work. Or you could stabilize the footage before you track it.
Set key frames in large movements that you know are accurate (and start with linear curves in the key frame editor). Also make the timing between frames the same. For example, set a key frame every 30 seconds. Then 15 seconds, then 7.5 seconds, etc. The less key frames the better. When you start to add too many it gets too complicated and hard to adjust.

Also, in your circumstance, you should put key frames on the camera, not the buildings. The buildings do not move. The camera does. So before you do anything, you need to try to align the camera to the POV (point of view) of the drone on frame 1, or 0. When you have the camera aligned, try to position the buildings.

This is what 3D tracking software does for us. It figures out the ground plane and calculates where the camera is in the scene and what the settings are for the camera if you don't have those.

It can be a little complicated

Saw this in Motion's help docs:

"Note: Although Motion provides a 3D workspace, tracking in Motion is planar. In other words, tracking does not occur in Z space. For example, if you are analyzing two features in a clip—and that clip is moving in 3D space—you are recording the changes in position, scale, or rotation over time in the clip, but not its actual 3D transformation."

i can use PFTrack，This is a great software、。You can export to a motion in the camera。