Hey guys,
Anyone out there used or heard of a programme called Icarus?
I think its a i think its a 3D motion tracker which creates, 3D models and motion information from video footage, all on a desktop system.
Is it anygood?
Has anyone used it?
Cheers TimP:)
Really? Thats good.
What have u used it for? Have u had an yproblems or found any limitations to the program, i was hoping that it exports camera movement to LW do you know if this is possiable?
Cheers TimP
Hi,
I’ve also downloaded the free, non-commercial version.
And being a free program, it’s incredible! If you want to know what it’s capable of, download some of the example AVI’s on the official homepage.
Limitations? TONS! But most of these are solved by YOU, when shooting the footage to be tracked.
Like most other tracking packages, Icarus works like a charm in a simple move forward/backward shot, with lots of markers on floor & walls. I tried it on a greenscreen crane shot of some Swedish pop music chicks, I downloaded from some VFX company’s homepage, and it worked great.
Then I tried it on some of my own handheld footage for a private CG project, and that worked like crap…
A piece of advice when shooting:
Like I said, have lots of camera markers, kept in planes that’ll give a lot of information about camera position, like the floor and walls on the left and right.
Have lots of the markers organized in vertical and horizontal lines, and on the floor, in a grid. - that’ll help you orient things in your 3D package.
Keep the markers in places where they’ll be easy to remove digitally, though…
Measure up the distance between the markers, in several places, if not all. That’ll help you scale things, of course…
The longer time the markers stay in frame, the better. Markers leaving and entering the frame at will is NOT good.
Want to track a CG object in on the floor or on the wall? Have a marker RIGHT THERE! Camera tracking is rarely an excact science, so don’t count on markers in the corners of a wall keeping perfect track of the middle of the wall! Things will slide…
In addition to tracking not being exact science, don’t count on rebuilding your entire set digitally, based only on tracking data… that was our mistake! 
Apart from that, there are also some annoying “features” in the interface… I found the scale and orientation features to work in bizarre, random ways… :surprised
Also, twice I’ve experienced that trying to calculate a camera move based on too few tracking points, crashes the program and corrupts the file!! Yup, all tracking data lost. So save often, under different file names! 
But, all bugs aside, like I said, for a free program, it’s incredible… and if you shoot your footage well, Icarus can do wonderful things for you.
Cheers,
(I’ve tried it with Max & Maya, but not with Lightwave…)
I have tried it and well, couldnt get any results since it crashed on me as soon as i would place tha markers. Thankgod i finally got acces to Realviz Matchmover, which is a tremendous package. (also a very pricy one, so im afraid i dont have it at home :()
Originally posted by TimP
[B]Thats just fantastic!Im going to download the it and have a play i think!! [/B]
Unfortunatly you can’t download it anymore unless you have a friend that has it. The guys who wrote it licensed it to Pixel Farm and they raised the price and are offering it as a new package called PTrack. Hopefully Pixel Farm will create a similar noncommercial version like icarus had.
Originally posted by beaker
Hopefully Pixel Farm will create a similar noncommercial version like icarus had.
Dont count on it. They hiked the price from £700 for commercial version Icarus to £3000 for PFtrack. And as far as I’m aware PFtrack wont include all of the features Icarus had.
Icarus also was more than just a motion tracker. After tracking the scene you could reconstruct the geometry, remove moving objects, stabilise wobbly footage, create a image mosaic, travelling mattes and export out to virtually all the 3d and compositing packages.
Id been using Icarus since if first went public and had been providing some feed back to the developers via their newsgroup. Luckley I managed to download the very last version 2.9 before they sold it off. Such a shame they didnt include the interpolated slow motion I requested a few weeks before hand.
The free version was great while it lasted but I sort of knew that a killer package like that would soon be snapped up. Bit of a shame nobody got the opportunity to buy the £700 Icarus with the knowledge that pixel farm were soon to take over. Good luck to the guys at AIG they worked super hard on Icarus.
Check out a short clip I created with the help of Icarus. It even made it into the Icarus Gallery.
http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=349
It was really great to be able to include some motion tracking shots in my upcoming show reel thanks to Icarus. 
What is the official site to Icarus?
And can someone of you guys just upload or send me the free version, please? I want to try it before I die!
http://web.archive.org/web/20021203195907/aig.cs.man.ac.uk/icarus/index.php
And can someone of you guys just upload or send me the free version, please? I want to try it before I die!
“If you’re like me, and you’ve been searching for a (legal) Icarus 3D-tracker download, you’ll be as happy as me within some minutes, because after a loooong link-hunt, I’ve found out where to get it!”
http://boards.theforce.net/Fan_Films/b10015/16721827/p1
or
http://files.filefront.com/Icarus_209/;3922266;;/fileinfo.html
Thanks to the guys at the ‘Jedi Council Forums’ to be discussing the same thing I’ve always hoped to be discussed!
Have fun with it! :bounce:
Greetz,
Gijs
Thanks, and it was also for my own luck… At least: I couldn’t wait to try working in Icarus, and in my opinion it’s just the most awesome piece of software of its kind! 
:bounce: Have fun with it , as I did!
By the way: I found a good (video) tutorial about using Icarus:
CLICK
(and off you go to the holy tread on the ‘Jedi Council Forums’)
[left]Have fun with the tutorial, and Icarus itselves!
[/left]
Icarus is pretty damn buggy. You could just buy PFHoe for $50 from the Pixel Farm. They bought Icarus a few years ago and turned it into a couple products. If your in School they give big discounts. The $5000 PFTrack is only $200 for students.
http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/contentfull.aspx?content=pfhoe.htm
http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/products/products.aspx?PID=3
I’ve done some test with it. It works great for a free software.
The only thing that I’ve found weird is that the export to Maya is strange. Maybe My camera is not well configurate because I have some kind of sweep.
I tested it exporting in 3Dsmax with a maxscript and it works clean !
So what’s the f$%k ?
Your using unsupported software that hasn’t been updated in 4 years. What did you think was going to happen
Icarus is a great tool!!
There is also another free camera tracker
Voodoo Camera Tracker
Ok, I’ve found the problem, It works cool finally !
About Voodoo, I already tested it but it is not as complex as Icarus is and I have better results with Icarus, less slides…
My icarus crashes everytime in the last stage of the camera track. I forget what its called, its after they got through something 3 times. Plus because its old it says adaptable with AE 5.5 and down. So the info isnt even useful. But it once was probably an amazing program.
The Pixel Farm purchased Icarus and made it into a commercial product that is now Pftrack, Pfmatch, Pfhoe, Pfbarn, etc… As I mentioned earlier, if you want a better version of Icarus, just buy one of those products.