Planars Before and After a 3-D Solve

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‌Planars Before and After a 3-D Solve

Here we consider what you can do with planar trackers that exist before a 3D solve, and how to make them consistent with a subsequent 3D solve.

After the 3-D solve, SynthEyes will have computed new locations for every tracker, including 2- and 3-D planar trackers, and any cloned corner trackers produced with the Create Planar Corners script.

The newly-produced location data will not match up exactly with the planar trackers or corner clones. The corner clones will not be precisely spaced to match the planar trackers, won't be coplanar, and the computed 3-D planar tracker locations won't match their original (still-displayed) positions.

While this may be surprising, it is not a bug, but a feature: the new data is more accurate than the old, and therefore different!

Since the main camera field of view is now different than the planar trackers' fields of view, you should not attempt to export them by running the Export Preparation script on them. That will tangle everything up. The exception: if your planar trackers all have the same FOV, and you set that FOV up as the Known FOV before solving (or for a re-solve), then it will still be possible to export the planar trackers directly. But remember that solver FOVs are more accurate!

So given that you should use the solver-computed FOV, and the planar trackers no longer line up, what should you do?

The first choice is to create new planar meshes that are the right size, shape, and position, using the 3-D viewports or perspective view. If you have set up a good coordinate system, or use the movable grid in the perspective view to snap onto the computed cloned corner tracker locations, you can create appropriate meshes easily.

The second alternative is to adjust the 3-D planar trackers to match the newly- computed field of view. To do that, go to each tracker's main frame, unlock it, and enter the Lens panel's FOV as the planar tracker's FOV. The corner positions will

automatically adjust slightly to match the new FOV (hopefully not much different). Then re-run the tracker through the shot, and re-lock it.

Note : you can also change the tracker to Known-FOV mode. There's a slight complication to this, as the Known-FOV data comes from the seed FOV track, not the solved FOV track. So if you want to do this, you need to copy the solve FOV to the seed FOV, whenever the solve changes, likely using Blast on the 3-D Panel. And each time you do that, the tracker needs to be re- tracked to the different FOV, which takes a while. Suggestions in this area welcome.

Once you have an overall 3-D solve, you can create additional planar trackers (see the note above). Planar trackers can be set as zero-weighted trackers (ZWTs), like regular trackers (and only on the regular Trackers panel!), which gives an instant 3-D solution as soon as two or more frames are solved. That solution gets used to determine planar tracker scaling. So there are some interesting possibilities there.

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