Camera Tracking with Voodoo and Blender

Well, it's a little bit of a minefield camera tracking using free software as you'd expect. Heres what I've been able to find out in a few hours:

To start with you will need a video file which you want to camera track. I used a simple camera and recorded video on it.

Next you need to convert this to an image sequence (not the most straight forward things to do suprisingly). After 20 mins of looking I found VirtualDub does this and many more video conversions (worth looking at). Also, you can get blender to do it for you by putting a camera with the video in the background and rendering out the sequence (handy).

Now you can get round to using Voodoo. Open the sequence and click on ¨Track¨ down in the bottom right (took me a while to find this the first time! Should be a menu item for it). This takes a while but eventually you'll have a nice bunch of points.

You need to export this as a python script for Blender.

To get this into Blender, you need to open up the text editor, open the .py script that was saved, then click File> Run Python Script (easy!!)

Now you have the camera animated and 3D points corrisponding to points in the real world.

I managed to find the Blender side of things from this web address: http://fictionality.co.uk/doku.php?id=tutorials:matchmoving

I might add to this when I find out more. But I'm still in the testing stages.

3d tree generation

I want to create realistic trees and bushes for a project to visualise Chesterfield covered in trees. I want to use free programs and came across Gen3 - http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:Py/Scripts/Manual/Wizards/Gen3 - http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2009/07/gen3-tree-script-url-updated.html for blender and Arbaro http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

Looks like it is easy to create shrubs and young trees but a little harder to create mature trees. There is some mature trees which look impressive though. Both these programs are based on the findings in the document Jason Weber & Joseph Penn: "Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees" -PDF - Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees which gives information on tree generation and some presets for trees. Might be helpful.