Panels

Panels

2D/3D Constraints

Pair a 2D track with a point on your geometry, and watch the error as you go.

Movie Clip Editor sidebar, Dope Track tab, under Track. Needs a clip loaded.

This is where you make the links. Each one pairs a tracked 2D marker with a specific point on a mesh, and once you have enough of them the solver can work out where the camera was.

It lives in the Movie Clip Editor because linking needs a marker picked here and a mesh element picked in the 3D viewport, and both views are already open. The clip is simply whichever one this editor is showing, so there's nothing to choose. The solving happens on the 2D/3D Constraints node instead.

A picker at the top, showing either Scene or the name of an object.

Scene is the camera solve, and there's exactly one per clip. Anything else is an object solve, and you can add as many as you need. The two never mix, so links you make against an object stay out of the scene's list.

The buttons beside it add, rename and remove. Rename and remove are greyed out on Scene, which isn't something you can delete.

Every link for the current target, with buttons beside it to remove the selected one or clear the lot.

The button that makes a link. It needs two things picked at once:

  1. A mesh in Edit Mode, with a vertex, edge or face selected
  2. A track selected in this editor

It stays greyed out until you're in Edit Mode, and the panel says so. Edges and faces work as well as vertices, using the midpoint and the center.

The error readout

Once you have links, a line at the bottom reports how well they currently fit, for the frame you're on:

Error F41: avg 1.24px  max 2.80px  (7 links)

The icon goes from a checkmark to a warning above 2 pixels average. A single link with a much larger max than the average is usually the one you placed wrong.

The full walkthrough is in 2D/3D Constraints.