Here are the two first tutorial about tracking with Blender, showing you how to do Corner Pin tracking and Stabilisation as well. ENJOY my friends !!
And stay tune since I’ll be releasing some scripts pretty soon which will do that “automatically” for you
Here we are finally !!! It’s coming !
In case you missed it, Blender got a GSOC this year to integrate Libmv into it. Which means by the end of the summer we should have 3D tracking available in Blender (at least in a branch if not in Trunk).
But the first step to that is to implement 2D trackers, and Sergey did already a great job for integrating this feature. I just tested it today, it is of course very new and not so stable, but we are really close to be able to do nice FX. Actually all I’m missing to start and really play is being able to use the tracking data as f-curves and re-use them into the compositor (which according to Sergey, should be enable soon).
Exciting days are coming my friends 
blender camera tracking test from Fish on Vimeo.
Camera tracking integration – Step 1 from Sergey I. Sharybin on Vimeo.
You will need to get a version of blender which is build against the Tomato branch in the SVN. You can build it yourself, or try to find one at Graphicall
To build it yourself, I recommend you to follow those following tutorials :
I think that if Skynet would have a name today, it would be called Boston Dynamics. :p
BigDog walking in snow
If you don’t know this company already (famous for its BigDog), they are genius ! Forget about all those crappy stupid robots that says “hi” and do some weird dance ! Those of Boston Dynamics are totally different and really creepy ! The beginning of the end as most people would say. No seriously, there work is awesome and you should check it out.
Before becoming Boston Dynamics, they were “The Leg Laboratory” (leglab). That was between 1980-1995, more than 15 years ago !!
BigDog is probably, as today, the most famous and most advanced robot from Boston Dynamics !
It is a 4 legs mule robot measuring 90 cm long and 76 cm tall and weight 108 Kg. It got a bunch of different sensors also gyroscope and a LIDAR with stereo vision system
BigDog can run at 6 Km and climb hills up to 35° ! all that by carrying an 154 Kg of stuff. And because it wasn’t enough, it could run for 20 Km without stopping or re-fueling (yes it does use fuel) (UPDATE video March 2010)
The ultimate goal for BigDog is to develop a robot that can go anywhere people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA.
Some Nice links :
As today, this is there new toy ! It is not a T800 yet, but we are getting close (UPDATE video April 2010)
Juan Bermudez did a cool facebook app called HalloweenPic based on the small Flash application I did a while ago.
I’m really happy (and proud ) that sharing the sources could help someone creating some cool stuff.
href="http://www.francois-tarlier.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/demo-of-adobe-flash-face-recognition-using-the-opencv-port-to-as3/">
That said, just go and test it here : http://apps.facebook.com/halloweenpic
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Before your say anything or think that this is not interesting check out this part of the video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk#t=158 !!! Somebody said spooky o_O ?
![Robot_Hand_Grasp_Grain_Rice_Tweezers[1]](http://www.francois-tarlier.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Robot_Hand_Grasp_Grain_Rice_Tweezers1.jpg "Robot_Hand_Grasp_Grain_Rice_Tweezers[1]")
If you want to know more about this research check out :
High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation | Hizook.
Intresting article about Microsoft Project Natal via Pixelsumo .
“Microsoft bought 3DV Systems. I instantly thought they were going to use this camera and their own sdk after seeing the demos, however Eurogamer reports:
“Aaron Greenberg was even more direct. Asked whether Natal was derived from 3DV technology, he told Eurogamer: ‘No, we built this in house.’”“Kim admitted ‘it’s a combination of partners and our own software’,…’ ”
There are rumors that Microsoft are working with & licensing patents from Prime Sense, another Israel company like 3DV …..
Full Article here : http://www.pixelsumo.com/post/project-natal
I talked about the Foundry working on solving the rolling shutter issue on a previous post. It seams they were waiting the Siggraph to announce it. At the time I though it was only for Nuke, but the great news is they also port their plugin to After Effect CS3 and CS4.
It seems they fixed the horizontal panning issue, but still not the vertical one, which at this point looks impossible but I’m actually waiting for another paper on stabilization which should show up at siggraph too. Anyway it’s going to help a lot for matchmove !!!
A few weeks ago I found an old project which is a port of KLT features detection port to Flash AS3 Class (more information about KLT features here)It’s running really slow, and the project seams to be discontinue, but I tried to recompile it with FlashDevelop and FlexSDK based on the previous test I did with Marilena :
This is what I come up with :
using KLT on webcam
Try the Demo Here
href="http://www.francois-tarlier.com/blog/index.php/2009/03/demo-of-adobe-flash-face-recognition-using-the-opencv-port-to-as3/">
This is a new “SpareTime Project”, playing (and testing) with Microsoft PhotoSynth.
Photosynth creates an amazing new experience with nothing more than a bunch of photos. Creating a synth allows you to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world.
Most likely all you have to do is to take hundreds of picture, load it in PhotoSynth and it will automaticly stitch it together in 3D space
This is my first attempt by taking picture of Montpellier Antigone. So far I tried to re-create the path of the entire Antigone. But I guess I didn’t took enought picutre (about 400 photos) so it couldn’t stitch some different part together.
You will need Silverlight to test it or PhotoSynth plugin for the DX version. (damn Microsoft … couldn’t use Flash like everybody >_<)
Related Link :
YouUp is a fun application by Ubisoft
YouUp transform your head live and add fun to your video conversations ! Create your own custom videos with movie style. Add special FX, change your background. It uses a face detection and tracking system to create 3D masks that follow your every move.
I’ve been working on this project for the past couple years as first a CG Artist and then as a Technical Artist Director working on pipeline, realtime matchmove, augmented reality and so more. The technology used is totally done by our team at Ubisoft.
Feel free to give it a try, it’s free, it works with your Windows Live Account. They’ll update it pretty often with new assets some are free, some other you can buy