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Overview
What Dope Track does, where to find it in Blender, and how the node workflow fits together.
Dope Track is a Blender add-on for camera tracking, solving, reconstruction, masking and clean plate work. You build each shot as a node graph instead of hunting through scattered panels.
The advantage shows up later. Every node remembers its own settings and where it wrote its files, so when you reopen a shot six months from now you can see exactly what happened and in what order.
What You Can Do
- Convert video into image sequences, with optional crop, resize and view transform
- Mask out people, cars or anything else by typing what you want removed
- Stick a rotoscope mask to tracked geometry so it follows the shot by itself
- Solve moving cameras, tripod shots and moving objects, each with its own mask
- Calibrate a lens from grid shots, or load a 3DEqualizer lens file
- Undistort and redistort plates
- Build sparse and dense point clouds, or a textured mesh from photos
- Link 2D tracks to 3D vertices to line up geometry
- Paint clean plates using a projected reference frame
- Send the finished camera, cloud, objects and mesh into your Blender scene
The Basic Shape Of A Graph
Most shots look like this:
Footage
-> Convert Footage (video becomes frames on disk)
-> Auto Track (solve the camera)
-> Output 3D (build the Blender scene)
Everything else hangs off that. Masking happens before the solve. Refining and densifying happen after it. Lens work can go on either side.
Where To Find It
| Area | What's there |
|---|---|
| Node Editor | The graphs themselves, plus Device, Files and Licenses in the sidebar |
| Movie Clip Editor | Tracking groups, 2D/3D constraints, Geo Mask, keyframe cleanup |
| Image Editor | Clean Plate painting |
| 3D Viewport | Align Scene, for setting floor, axis, origin and scale |
Press N in any of those to open the sidebar, then pick the Dope Track tab.
Version
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Dope Track |
| Version | 1.2.1 |
| Blender | 5.1 or newer |
| Platform | Windows (64-bit) |
| Author | Rajeev |
Blender 5.1 is a hard minimum. The bundled programs are built for its version of Python, so older Blender releases can't load them.
Nothing To Install
COLMAP, GLOMAP, OpenMVS, FFmpeg, a CUDA build of OpenCV and rawpy all ship inside the add-on. Tracking, solving and reconstruction work as soon as you enable it.
The only thing that downloads later is the AI masking model, and only if you use that feature. See GPU and Dependencies.