Good tool for grid based 2d warp?

[Swahn]

Regardless of what software package you might use, is there a tool that allows me to use grid based 2d warp and at the same time having the ability to link individual points to trackers?

What i need to do is to track a rectangle of eight tracker markers on a news paper page, and nail a moving image to the page.

As you can imagine a regular four corner pin won’t work since the surface isn’t completely flat.

So far i have checked out Adobe After Effect to find that the Mesh Warp tool is utterly useless for this, not only in it’s own workflow, but you can’t expose individual mesh points and link them to trackers for example. Apparently this is a hardcoded “feature” so no script can gain access to it’s positions, or you have to code a completely new plugin if you want to make it work the way i want.

I’ve checked Autodesk’s Toxik/Composite too, it does have more features that get me closer to what i want to achieve, but not all the way unfortunately. If i use the Warp 2D tool i can get close to the result i want, but i always get unwanted distortion, in corners mostly and what i need are clean, sharp corners.

I also checked out a plugin for After Effects called Re:Flex Warp, together with some custom script it does almost exactly the same thing as Warp 2D in Composite except with less control. And i get the same unwanted distortion there too.

So my conclusion is that a grid based warp is much more accurate in this case because it knows what to do with the surface in the middle.

Does anybody know a solution for this? Nuke for example has a really nice grid based warp, but it requires one to script link points to trackers somehow, but i don’t doubt it is possible in Nuke. Too bad we don’t have a license for Nuke here at work

[magnoborgo]

On Nuke, you don’t need any scripts to link Gridwarp point (or any roto spline/spline warper points) to trackers. Just grab the tracker animation curve icon to the desired point and the animation is backed on the point.

I would recommend Nuke spline warper or Shake warper for what you need to do.

[Swahn]

On Nuke, you don’t need any scripts to link Gridwarp point (or any roto spline/spline warper points) to trackers. Just grab the tracker animation curve icon to the desired point and the animation is backed on the point.

I would recommend Nuke spline warper or Shake warper for what you need to do.

That is excellent to know! Thanks!

[Swahn]

On Nuke, you don’t need any scripts to link Gridwarp point (or any roto spline/spline warper points) to trackers. Just grab the tracker animation curve icon to the desired point and the animation is backed on the point.

I would recommend Nuke spline warper or Shake warper for what you need to do.

I just tried using the PLE version and it worked like a charm! :bounce:

Just got two questions. If you drag the animation curve to a point you are only copying the contemporary curve to the point right? If you make a change to the tracker you have to update the animation curve on the point it seems.

Also, is there any way to deal with the beizer tangents on the GridWarp perhaps?
In this case i can just reduce the subdivisions to 1 so it will basically ignore the beizer tangents. Is there any other way to make them follow the rotation of the overall grid in case you wish to use them anyway?

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