C4D Motion Tracking & 3D model placement onto footage tutorial with David Villa

In this guest tutorial, learn how to track a 3D model onto a footage using Cinema4D, Octane Renderer, and After Effects with David Villa, a motion design generalist at WarnerMedia Studios!
00:00 - introduction
01:55 - best practices for motion tracking
04:55 - importing footage and tracking settings
09:10 - masking moving objects before tracking
11:25 - fine-tuning 2D tracking setting & auto-track
14:15 - assessing the quality of track via motion track graph view
15:20 - 3D Solve & Reconstruction
20:35 - generating point cloud for visualization
22:40 - placing the car model
24:20 - adding lighting and shadow with Octane
29:15 - rendering image sequences
32:40 - AE compositing & color correction
🎥 David Villa
→ www.davidmvilla.com/
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[@Andonchoto]

This was such an in dept tutorial. Its better than my teachers at uni explained the subject. You have a gift to teach!

[@NoSleepCreative]

Wow, thank you!

[@ChrisSh1984]

What an awesome tutorial. Easily the best motion tracking one for Cinema 4D. Thank you!

[@germanmairen]

Amazing tutorial! it covers all the things I needed for C4D, thx!! 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻

[@thenoisebleed9110]

I need to get more sleep but I'm too busy being creative. Great channel name hahaha. I learned a lot and appreciate the insight!

[@alexandersimmo7033]

The way you initially explained how the tracker works was so helpful. I always try to understand to the best of my abilities how the software I’m working with operates. Not having to google that up was awesome. Great dude, subscribed, I hope your channel grows

[@NoSleepCreative]

Thank you, glad it was helpful!

[@fzkrm]

Dude I can't believe how I didn't knew about this insane channel yet, your videos are hugely underrated and high quality! Amazing stuff. Keep it coming!

[@NoSleepCreative]

thank you very much; I appreciate it! There will be more to come!

[@diegocosttavfx]

Great tutorial!

[@dhidavidhuys8487]

Thank you David ! Cheers from Belgium

[@reyyy.115]

This was a great tutorial! thank you!

[@DanielViteripixplanet]

This is great stuff. Thanks!!

[@greentokyo]

Exactly the tutorial I needed! Thanks!!

[@NoSleepCreative]

Glad to hear it!

[@GreigMiddlemiss]

How cool. I do a search for this subject and the second tutorial in a very niche set of results features stock footage from my local park. 🤣🤣 Definitely bookmarked for some holiday viewing. 👍

[@yihangshen4611]

Thank you!

[@PatternIntegrityFilms]

Great tut, thanks!

[@NoSleepCreative]

You're welcome!

[@canmore5288]

Hey nice videos can you explain more about the grid line alignment with the ground. Im a newbie to C4d matchmove on the other hand in 3D equalizer and any other software aligning the grid to the ground need to be done at first right .

[@Ammir_koudia]

Really nice

[@NoSleepCreative]

thank you!

[@TheProcessDesign]

Great tutorial! When I render a frame to picture viewer it only shows the objects with a black background. How do I get the frame of the footage to render also with the objects?

[@simonDmotiondesign]

Hey, nice video!! I have a problem using the tracker. When 3d solving is completed, and I scrub through the timeline, the tracked points don't stay in place at the beginning, they move with the camera to a certain point and then later on they keep sticking to certain places. Do you know what to do there?

[@emarinm1]

Hello. Excellent tutorial. This is due to the fact that when I reconstructed the mesh I could see that a rectangular building was reconstructed with a large deformation, looking from above it was practically a rhombus, with an angle at the corner of about 110° sexagesimal degrees instead of 90° ? Greetings.

[@chillsounds4088]

Hi, nice tutorial. Do you think its better to add a position constraint if you had the static object like a car? Im still assure of the vector constraints...my understanding is that is gives the 3d track a better understanding of the plane as in where all the axis are. I normally wack a few of them on. Also i still cant totally figure out the render with the whole image in octane. As in the 3d object and footage as one. I know how to do this with the standard render easy with the composite tag and adding the png sequence etc but when using octane i get the background, but have trouble with the plane. So i end up just render out in alpha and compositing in after effects. Would you say that's the way to go?

[@TheDavidv19]

Sorry for the late reply man! I appreciate the kind words. I think position constraints will work fine too. It kind of depends on your scene/footage and what you have going on. For my footage, its easy to see the ground plane and its orientation, so vector or planar constrains were the way to go. If you have more objects in your footage covering the ground I'd say try a position constraint and see if that works better. To have the model over the footage in C4D, I added a background object and added a texture to it with my footage as an image sequence. For my octane settings I have alpha checked on but kept keep environment off. This should do the trick. That way when you render you can just turn off the background object and render the model on alpha with the shadow catcher on. Let me know of this works for you!

[@chillsounds4088]

@@TheDavidv19 Hey thanks for the reply, yer that's kinda of what i have been doing with octane and the image sequence on the background. I am fairly new to cinema 4d so i think i just need to do a few more projects to master it. Hope you can do a few more cinema 4d tutorials no matter what level of difficulty. i need to learn a bit more on after effects which i see your channel has so itake a look. I love tutorials where people actually spend them time to explain and talk rather than do a screen capture and it seems so hard to come by, so keep them coming.👍

[@TheDavidv19]

@@chillsounds4088 Gotcha, yeah took me a couple of attempts to get it to work properly. Thanks! for sure, hope to do some more tuts soon!

[@hatsunemikuchannel2023]

That's better than Blender! Unfortunetaly, I didn't found a "End Frame" section for my MikuMikuDance videos yet... There's only a "Start Frame" section... 😮😮😔😔

[@MORTONRICK]

Very nice. Wish you would have used one of the included renderers rather than Octane. Macs can't use it.

[@NoSleepCreative]

Thanks! Actually, mac can now use Octane and Redshift: home.otoy.com/octane-x-launch/

[@darkwyndigo]

Do you have link to download free octane render?

[@way1888]

How to delete Tracker Tags from Motion tracker?

[@kasperrubin5754]

I get no points when clicking the create auto track button.

[@Psihosenser]

2:20 isn't it all software, not hardware?

[@petrholusa5855]

I am surprised it worked for you. I gave up after trying a simple green screen with tracking points.

[@Mavellyrical]

Ohhh that's great ❤️ but I think most of people like after effects tutorial only!

[@timcity]

I don't know why you would take 40 minutes to do this when running a Full Solve only takes 5?

[@TumitchFX]

Full solve probably downscale resolution of original footage to do it faster.

[@GrafDe]

Smacking your lips before each word doesn't sound so good!