Keen Tools For Nuke

If you pop over to nukepedia you will find some great 3D tools by these guys. Pintools (great interactive way to position a 3D object in nuke), Geotools (an amazing object tracker that will track your imported 3D object into a live action plate) & ReadRiggedGeo (which allows you to bring in a 3D object rigged to a skeleton & animate/transform/tweak it in nuke). 

Geotracker was a free beta for about a year and a half but has now become commercial software, but give the trial a go as its a handy piece of kit.

They also have an optical flow beta but it is no longer supported (find that one here). I have used the Geotracker to do some temp face replacements & it worked great. I’ll pop some intro videos and links to their nukepedia pages below. 

Geotracker

GeoTracker is a lightweight Nuke plugin for the model-based single view object tracking. Go to nukepedia page here.

ReadRiggedGeo

ReadRiggedGeo is a Nuke plugin for loading skeleton-based deformable models and manipulating skeletal animation. Go to the nukepedia page here.

PinTool

With PinTool, to manipulate a 3D-model, you simply drag control points on its surface (pins) to their correct position in the frame. Go to nukepedia page here.

Here’s a quote from Roman Belov, off the nuke Facebook page about geotracker evolution:

Hi Nukers, let me share one story behind GeoTracker with you.

GeoTracker development was initiated with a single Feeling. The Feeling that all modern VFX trackers, which I use, force me to do tons of extra job. The job which mostly can be done automatically.

When we released the first beta build, it was a great breakthrough for us. It was released along with a demo script with a car footage, which could be tracked with 9 keyframes. 9 keyframes for a 100 frames shot. It was a bit better than PFtrack result on the same footage. But the Feeling didn’t go away.

Then we continued delivering improvements in our solver. We significantly extended corpus of out tests. And Geotracker Beta 5 could track the same footage with only 6 keyframes. The Feeling started to fade away but didn’t disappeared. Then we put our hands to reading hardcore papers, reviewing our methods and trying very complex approaches, but the solver wasn’t getting any better.

But a month ago, an idea suddenly appeared — a bright and very simple one. Nothing related to higher mathematics or cutting edge science. The idea that has improved “refine” significantly. Today I’m happy to present GeoTracker Beta 7. It can track the same car with only 2 keyframes. The solution has become better for all our tests as well.