TRACK THIS! - Camera Tracking From Blender To Unreal Engine

[@The-Game-Master]

This is the most useful tutorial for this ever. Man you don't know how many weeks, channels, videos, and project I have gone through o find someone who had a solution your showcase of the Unreal addon lifechanging!!! Amazing!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Nice! Glad it helped

[@ElhajMahmoud]

I just watched this and I’m gonna try it. Been trying forever to find a workflow to learn how to use tracking so I could use it for green screen footage and add vfx with unreal engine. It’s very thorough so thank you

[@marcfruchtman9473]

The amount of information you needed to absorb to get this all working... amazing.

[@Coastfog]

I can feel your spirit to figure out things your own way, being creative, thinking outside the box. Thanks for giving me some ideas I've never seen anywhere else and probably never would've come up with myself!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Good luck with your creative work. I would love to see what you make from your new ideas.

[@Kriscoart]

This was great to find! I've been pushing learning tracking through blender for too long and finally learned through this video. Great work on this!

[@bantertv9332]

Wish you a very prosperous year mate. Looked all over for this workflow using free blender and free unreal as apposer to cinema 4d, adobe after effects etc and couldn’t find anything until I found this video. Your willingness to relinquish detail and showing clearly the steps involved including the buttons to press enlarged on screen is unprecedented!! Your channel is way underrated, and my wishes for you at that you x10 your subscribers this year!! Thank you so very much for this. I have subbed and will be checking out all your other videos in the coming days and weeks. All the very best and again, much much appreciated! 👍👍👍👍

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks for this comment. It's super cool to hear your thoughts. Im glad you enjoy my videos that and the tutorials have been useful. Im sure there will be more tutorials to come and lots more crazy short films.

[@davewaldmancreative]

I just tried it. it worked! Go to scene, units, and set to 0.01

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Brilliant!

[@violentpixelation5486]

Super helpful, Joshua! Thanks alot. I'm using in the moment Syntheyes as a tracker and go directly to Unreal, but great to see your workflow. I'm also using Blender. Love it.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad you enjoyed the walkthrough. I haven't used syntheyes, how have you found it?

[@violentpixelation5486]

@@JoshuaMKerr hi, I was working in a matchmove department for almost 2 years back in 2008-2010 and they've just it heavily. It's a cheap genius matchmove program. 🔥💯

[@violentpixelation5486]

@@JoshuaMKerr but I gotta say also, that I'm using more and more Blenders Tracking Features. They are awesome, too.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thats a top tip. I might have a peek into that.

[@CGMatter]

great tutorial

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks

[@fhajji]

Excellent video! Thank you for sharing this knowledge. Except for the Octane stuff at the end (it's not longer free and only available as subscription, right?), this is very useful and quite inspiring. Watching it after the CGMatter tutorial series on Blender 2.8 Motion Tracking, so it makes a lot of sense now! Parenting the camera in UE5 to an Empty, and scaling that was the missing piece of this puzzle. Hoping you'll do an updated version of this video for UE 5.3 and Blender 4.0+ without Octane, and using the send2ue plugin provided by Epic Games. Also, _please_ without distracting background music.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks for the feedback, I might do an update of this video. Also, Octane remains free.

[@chanenchong]

Hi Josh, love your content! A life saver for transferring motion tracking data to UE. A question tho! Whenever I save the UE project file or begin exporting cinematic sequence from UE, my cine camera sequence unlinks itself from the Empty “Camera Mover” Actor and resets. How do I prevent it from repeating?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi. Ive had this happen before but im not sure what solved it. Have you tried deleting and re-creating the mover and camera.

[@joetrimble5961]

Have either of you had any luck figuring this out? I'm trying to use a process similar to this , (importing an FXB from blender for camera animation,) and have been trying to use an actor to properly scale and manipulate the move in my scene. But every single time I go to render, the camera resets its position and comes unlinked just like you said. I'm looking all over for a solution.

[@doc4678]

Solution: Create the actor, camera and plane outside of the sequence itself and link it afterwards and then import the tracking data to the camera you created before. hope it helps! cheers

[@doc4678]

small addition: theres a small yellow lightningbolt indicator in the outliner, whenever you've created a 'spawnable' actor inside a sequence. With these it does not work for me, or i haven't figured it out properly

[@joetrimble5961]

@@doc4678 Thanks for the response! I've been importing the FBX tracking data to the camera inside sequencer, to clarify, would you add the camera to sequencer after it's linked to the actor and then import the fbx? Or would you be doing it another way entirely?

[@Grigga]

your tutorial is BADASS!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks!

[@DREAMALLIANCE]

Great tutorial, many thanks for uploading! Do you think this technique would work for tracking camera movement while filming a subject that is moving, for example, a person who is talking, and moving their arms and head about? If not, would you have any tips on how we could do that? Cheers!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

It can absolutely work, because you can delete any points that try to track the subject so the camera solve is more accurate.

[@abalofiradio1758]

I cannot select the tracking curves in blender in order to clean them up. how to enable curve selection?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Sorry, Im not sure offhand, I dont remember having to do anything special. Perhaps someone will jump in and help with this.

[@SAMISUNG197450]

Handsome! Thanks for the lesson!!! Useful chips that others don't talk about!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad it was helpful!

[@shahabfilm1]

Hello. After connecting the camera to the actor and scaling it, I have a problem with RenderQ. The camera comes out of the actor sub-category and it is the same size as the first one. can you help

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I would try creating a new camera and copying the keyframes from your imported tracking animation to a new level sequence.

[@shahabfilm1]

@@JoshuaMKerr Thank you . Please make a camera tracking tutorial in Blender and a camera set in Unreal. Of course, with rendering in renderQ

[@Dannyreyfilms]

You are brilliant sir!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks! Hope it was helpful.

[@descendinguniverse]

Nice one! My cat is all grey with fold ears, not sure if trackers would even stick to her at all haha

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Yeah cats are tricky subjects haha

[@ifeellikeiwasborntoloveya6547]

is this why background sets for chroma keyeing has "+" in them?? do they use that instead to track their uhmm virtual cameras

[@JoshuaMKerr]

That's exactky right. And this is prety much the process of matching the camera motion with your CGI.

[@ifeellikeiwasborntoloveya6547]

dude honestly, how did you even figure this out. ur so cool

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Really glad you enjoyed the work I'm doing. It takes a bit of figuring out, I just want to make cool things and help others do the same.

[@ifeellikeiwasborntoloveya6547]

i wanted to make an impressive virtual product then someone recommended me this and im so grateful reeeeeee

[@shaunbay2]

This is something unreal needs to improve on. Tried C4d, blender, AE, Maya, but there is too much guess work, especially with bigger movements, flaws shows up pretty quickly. I guess its why people prefer tracking apps which are accurate enough to then adjust afterwards. I did read that someone used 3Dvisualizer to cinema4d to datasmith UE and got what I consider perfect results. But since those are expensive softwares, I never got around to try them.

[@zombiebobo]

Thank you

[@RegisNo1]

Nice man, that was exactly I was looking for, hope I can replicate your workflow and somehow use it in my project ;)

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Any time mate.

[@thegreatSalu]

Hey! This is great..as a Maya user how you imported the footage into unreal?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi Salman.The footage was exported from after effects as a png sequence (with alpha) and imported as image media.

[@thegreatSalu]

@@JoshuaMKerr I'm having problem, its rendering but only the skybox not the footage. I've downloaded Octane Renderer for Unreal but its taking hours..is there way to render from Octane for limited frames? Cheers!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Yes, you can set the frame range in the sequencer export options.

[@thegreatSalu]

@@JoshuaMKerr That's the thing, when I use the Sequencer it only exports the Skybox but when I use the Octane Render it renders the footage,,

[@thegreatSalu]

@@JoshuaMKerr Hey..are you on DIscord?

[@artemlt]

Great video! Have one question, after saving scene or starting to render, my Camera from blender detach from Camera mover, and scale is not correct, maybe you know how can i fix this attach? Thanks

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I think you need o set the unit scale in blender before bringing it into unreal. About the camera detatching you could try linking the objects in sequencer instead of the details panel.

[@artemlt]

@@JoshuaMKerr Thanks, will try this!

[@artemlt]

@@JoshuaMKerr wow it works, attached in sequencer, thank You Joshua you made my day!🤌🏻

[@JoshuaMKerr]

No worries. Let me know if you solve the scale issue

[@artemlt]

@@JoshuaMKerr solved

[@wjm123]

when I parent my cinecam to the empty actor, and move the empty actor to the position I want. The CineCam immediately jumps back to the original position after playing back in sequencer, unaltered by the empty actor. The transform controls in the cinecam are all already set to relative instead of world. Any ideas?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Maybe try creating a new level sequence and new cine camera actor. Then paste the camera transform keyframes across from the imported sequence to the new one.

[@wjm123]

@@JoshuaMKerrI managed to get it to work, I was thinking of the coordinates all wrong 😅

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Aha! good work

[@simonevrech4870]

@@wjm123 I've got the same issue... ho did you fix it? Thanks!

[@wjm123]

@@simonevrech4870 hey! you might be doing the same as what I was trying to do by placing an empty actor, copying the location of the cine camera to the empty actor, so that now the empty actor and camera are literally on each other, then moving the empty actor to 0,0,0. And by doing this you realise that the cine camera just jumps back to the original location. All this is happening because the sequencer already has keyframes for the cine camera at specific co-ordinates (for example. 100,100,0), and if you notice, when you put the empty actor exactly on the cine camera and you parent the cine cam to the actor, the cine camera's co-ordinates will now become 0,0,0 because its 0,0,0 relative to the empty actor. Hence, when the sequencer starts play back, its gonna jump to 100,100,0 RELATIVE to the empty actor. Once you understand this, you'd know where you went wrong. TLDR: you could just fix this by 1) going to the first keyframe in the sequencer so that the cine cam moves into the first position, 2) then place an empty actor to the location where you'd want the camera to be 3) Parent the cine cam to the empty actor 4) copy and paste the relative location of the cine cam to the empty actor but flip the sign (ie if the cine cam was 100,100,0 put -100,-100,0 for the location of the empty actor) now you'll have the cine cam moved to the location you want. That how I'd do it, not sure if there's a better way. hope that helps :)

[@mariorodriguez8627]

great job!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks!

[@AliNajip11]

thank you so mach ..

[@vighneyshivalkar7662]

how can i export camera + obeject at the same time while using this addon

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I think if you select the object there will be an option in the plugin to change it from 'auto' to 'set recursive'.

[@SAMISUNG197450]

how to attach a video with a moving person to the camera tracker in Unreal Engine 5.3

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Assuming I understand correctly you should just drag it onto the camera actor to parent it.

[@TheAndrizone]

Amazing!!!... Thanks

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad you liked it!

[@CoPaMundiaL1909]

is this method still a good way in 24? or are there better ways to do it?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Should still work for traditional matchmove tracking workflows.

[@chuckmoment]

hey man i keep getting this error message when I import the camera track to the sequencer: "Failed to find any matching camera for CineCameraActor. Importing onto first camera from fbx Camera3D1" what is this??

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I haven't come across this error, sorry. It's been a while since I've used this workflow.

[@asafox5352]

Is it still working with Unreal Engine 5? - And the latest version of Blender. (I know a lot of people looking for this answer.) Regardless, thank you for the tutorial.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

It shoud work with UE5. The plugin's latest release was for Blender 3.5

[@pomeloyou]

Why your refine 11:27 can select length K1 K2 ? My menu is only checkbox can be select.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I'm not sure to be honest. What version of blender are you using?

[@pomeloyou]

@@JoshuaMKerr I'm using the 3.3 .

[@JoshuaMKerr]

@@pomeloyou Looks like it may have been removed.

[@sohrabhosseini981]

nice dude!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Glad its useful

[@mbpaiva]

Thank you so much for this!

[@JoshuaMKerr]

No bother. Hope it works for you

[@davewaldman2194]

Update. Found it! HI Joshua. Thank you for your videos. You do the 'wading through and getting out the other side' really nicely. I'm super hoping you can help me with a question. I'll ask and hope you can answer! I create my camera using ae2blender but when i try to export it to Unreal I a) can't see the camera so i can't 'export recursive'. Do you have any idea what i've done wrong? It's a super simple camera move. Thank you, Joshua. Dave

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Haha no worries, Thanks for the kind words. Just in case anybody is searching through comments how did you solve this?

[@davewaldman2194]

@@JoshuaMKerr I'll hadn't clicked on 'object'.🙂. Incidenlty, unreal5 ... i tried pasting the camera data and nothing seemed to happen. The 'scale to 0.1 feels arbitary. I'm gonna try and find a more precise way to bring in a camera or have you already done so?

[@sonnhost]

hi, i have problem when i creat actor to control camera seq(location, rotation, scale), it still ok then i CTRL+S camera unlink form Actor and return all transform when i import. How to fix that

[@JoshuaMKerr]

What version of the engine are you using?

[@刘响-s9z]

me too here

[@lolerr228]

Спасибо большое очень спас

[@JoshuaMKerr]

You're welcome

[@rishabhdhir5306]

after installing the plugin, i still don't see the unreal option on the right after selecting the camera, Ami doing something terribly wrong here wrong?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

The usual suspects are the version of the plugin and version of blender. maybe check those first. Then double check the addon is active.

[@mf646]

@@JoshuaMKerr I have a feeling he was talking about not having the unreal engine tab on the side of the screen after installing...Only reason I'm assuming this is because I was stuck on that part too lol. But the solution is to hit "N" to bring up the tabs, and Unreal engine should be on there. I'm a noob, so it's an understandable thing to get stuck on.

[@lukascowey1423]

Great work 👏

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Thanks cous!!

[@SipodshowTv]

this is a great tutorial! have you used Byplay at all? would be good to ee an actual tutorial that takes from Byplay into unreal (as I can't find any!)

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I haven't tried but it looks interesting! It really comes down to whether the tracking data is good enough and translates well from the phone to cine camera footage. Otherwise the process of going from blender to unreal would likely be the same.

[@志扬徐-h6w]

Hi there.I'm wondering how to change the camera's worldposition in UE. I want to focus the object in the other position but not the (0,0,0),how can i do this in blender or UE?Thanks

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Can you give a bit more detail. I dont quite understand what youre trying to acheive. If its just to change the origin then you could parent it to an actor somewhere else in the scene. Sorry if thats not what youre after.

[@志扬徐-h6w]

@@JoshuaMKerr Thanks for reply.I had tried the attach the CineCameraActor to an actor,and move the actor where i want. But when i start previewing LevelSequence,it doesn't work as i expected.(For example in UE,on the beginning,the CameraActor Position was(0,0,0),Rotation is(0,0,0),I move ed the CameraActor to the Position(10,10,10) Rotation(30,30,30).And clicked preview. The CameraActor went back to (0,0,0).

[@志扬徐-h6w]

​@@JoshuaMKerr Also,before export the camera in blender,i try to modify the "Additional location",but it seams not working.🥲

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Are you setting the camera transform in the level sequence? Sometimes deleting and re creating the camera cuts layer can help.

[@志扬徐-h6w]

​@@JoshuaMKerr I delete the imported camera cuts,OMG,it works!Thank you so mush🥰

[@davewaldmancreative]

Hey josh. Have you seen the error messsage saying UniScale for blender must be 0.01. Maybe this is why your camera is coming in so big?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Been a while since I tried this but good to know you have the solution.

[@akashkrishna6207]

will it works on unreal engine 5 ?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I haven't tried but don't see why not.

[@Stallagmite]

Very cool...but such an inconvenient workflow 😬, all the steps and not having the scale match at the end is a killer. I've been liking camtrackAr which can send the app's live camtracking fbx directly to UE4 without any fiddling... It seemed like bledartrack was an even tighter live tracking system, but one is still stuck with the inconvenient fbx export to UE4...

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Its just one of many tools. They all have drawbacks and plus points but this does offer extra flexibility especially when live tracking data messes up...which does happen. Good to have a fallback option.

[@Stallagmite]

@@JoshuaMKerr Yeah, I still can't get camtrackar to work clean enough, blendertrack app seems to work well, but has the import problems.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I feel you. Its really always down to what level of accuracy and quality you can live with. I dont mind spending the extra time to push it as far as I can.

[@dylanwainwright8644]

@@JoshuaMKerr I was noticing at 17:09 that your camera's scale in Blender was at 1.812. I believe this might be where you had scaling issues when transferring to Unreal. Did you ever apply scale to the camera in Blender to reset scale to 1 before sending To Unreal??

Great 🔥

[@davidpringuer3553]

19:25 is a deal breaker

[@JoshuaMKerr]

There may be a way to get the exact scale but I'm not sure how it's done. I prefer live tracking to get that level of precision

[@SipodshowTv]

whenever i pate the cmd it accepts it and is green, but doesnt trigger the save sequence as pop up. what am i doing wrong?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Do you have all of the correct plugins installed into unreal as shown. I also came across this problem when using an earlier version of blender for unreal engine. Make sure that blender addon is also up to date.

[@SipodshowTv]

@@JoshuaMKerr hmm, I'm using blender 2.81 (sub 16)..is that too old?

[@SipodshowTv]

@@JoshuaMKerr and the add on I'm using is the v0.3.0

[@JoshuaMKerr]

This should be fine but you could try with the latest blender too. Version 3.0 of the addon worked for me. I was using unreal 4.26 and also 4.27. Check that the plugins you need are enabled.

[@SipodshowTv]

@@JoshuaMKerr thanks I'll give that a try

[@davewaldmancreative]

Last one, Josh! kzbin.info/www/bejne/e2GZomWgn9Vnj7s Getting closer. Super useful for filmmaking if it works

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Hi, sorry I've not been quick to reply. Lots going on on my end. So you have a scene imported from blender with a tracked camera plus the original footage. And you want to have the pillar in front of the video footage yes? How is your video material set up. Are you setting the uv yo screen position or similar?

[@davewaldmancreative]

@@JoshuaMKerr Hi Josh. Thanks for replying. So I tracked the camera in AE. wouldn't take in Blender. Used your tutorial to get the camera data out but made UniLevel to .01 which abs. worked. Then ... made an image plate, locked it to the camera, made a material / image sequence etc. And so close. Now I'm trying to see 'through' the image sequence to accurately place actors. I'm trying to embed actors in a pre shot scene, so super relevant to film making. just in case you've come across this 🙂

[@davewaldmancreative]

@@JoshuaMKerr Not 'in front' but both visible, so a person can 'add' elements to a pre shot scene.

[@deezuschrist]

There's gotta be a better way to align your footage with the 3D track/scene. It's really sketchy to be eyeball matching the footage with the 3D camera. Is there no way to just make them exact without fiddling around manually trying to match it? This can't be the best way

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Well you could create and export a plane or cube along with your tracked camera. That should help you align with a floor and also get scale correct.

[@TerminatorTestosterone]

ur cat looks the same as one of my cats what

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Is yours psychotic as well?

[@TerminatorTestosterone]

@@JoshuaMKerr no

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Lucky

[@emmanuelbiney1780]

I still don't get it why blender tracking is complicated

[@JoshuaMKerr]

It's just a bit of a clunky interface. It's super powerful at tracking and complicated because of the level of control you get.

[@ApexArtistX]

Never works in unreal

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Been a while since I looked at this workflow. Might need to revisit this

[@Kapialbha27632]

Will this work in UE5.3 or not if not how should I do camera track in ur 5.3)?

[@nimitverma3460]

Incomplete knowledge

[@JoshuaMKerr]

What's missing

[@nimitverma3460]

U have to use Data Smith plugin> then transfer camera and tracking data> I saw in some video> then apply video to image plate> then it turns into video footage tracking > means it does not place the video in an unreal scene> it has to put the unreal scene inside the video> so that unreal models and particles system appear in the video as it happens in Blender> also u don't have to clean tracking data yourself > just use flax trax or kent tools geotracker> they automatically solve camera error> I hope u make a quick detailed video on this urgently

[@nimitverma3460]

​@@JoshuaMKerrU have to use Data Smith plugin> then transfer camera and tracking data> I saw in some video> then apply video to image plate> then it turns into video footage tracking > means it does not place the video in an unreal scene> it has to put the unreal scene inside the video> so that unreal models and particles system appear in the video as it happens in Blender> also u don't have to clean tracking data yourself > just use flax trax or kent tools geotracker> they automatically solve camera error> I hope u make a quick detailed video on this urgently

[@thai_le_foto]

This didn't work, it gave me a LogPython Error =( LogPython: Error: Traceback (most recent call last): LogPython: Error: File "P:/Video2023/Christine O'Malley/Blender/ExportedFbx/ImportSequencerScript.py", line 319, in LogPython: Error: print(CreateSequencer()) LogPython: Error: File "P:/Video2023/Christine O'Malley/Blender/ExportedFbx/ImportSequencerScript.py", line 285, in CreateSequencer LogPython: Error: camera_binding_id = seq.get_binding_id(camera[1]) LogPython: Error: AttributeError: 'LevelSequence' object has no attribute 'get_binding_id'

[@JoshuaMKerr]

Its been a while since I mse this tutorial. Make sure you have a version of the blender for unreal plugin that is compatible with your unreal version.

[@thai_le_foto]

@@JoshuaMKerr Yeah I did =/ I will try the older version maybe, the newest one was a preview version for 4.0 and I am still using 3.6

[@treythesmall6723]

Does this work in UE5?

[@JoshuaMKerr]

I dont see why not. I haven't tried but cant see a problem.

[@treythesmall6723]

@@JoshuaMKerr I just didn't know if the plug ins worked the same way.

[@JoshuaMKerr]

@@treythesmall6723 Let me know if you get it working.