Introduction
Table of Contents
Welcome to mocha, tracking and rotoscoping tools that make your tracking and rotoscoping work much easier.
Our tools are based on our proprietary Planar Tracking technology, an awesome approach to 2D tracking which will help you to generate accurate corner-pins and track and transform your roto splines in a powerful way.
Please note: This manual covers all products in the mocha family. Export and interface features may differ between mocha Pro and mocha AE. Legacy applications such as mokey and monet will have significant interface difference to the current versions. Please refer to their offline manuals.
Tracking and rotoscoping are part of almost any visual effects project. For 2D tracking, point trackers are most commonly used, but to get good point tracks requires a mix of experience and luck. You often have to “prime” a clip for optimum tracking using color correctors and other image manipulations. If the point being tracked exits frame, you get into offset tracking, which presents its own set of challenges. If it all fails, you are into hand tracking, which is time consuming and very hard to get accurate.
Mocha is a 2D tracker that requires less experience and luck to be successful with, does not require the image to be primed and is less likely to require a lot of tricks or hand tracking on difficult shots.
In mocha splines are used for both tracking and rotoscoping. This is a different method from standard 1-point or multi-point tracking tools.
Traditional tracking tools require that you locate “points” that remain consistent throughout the entire shot in order to track movement. This is itself a difficult task, especially when tracking a shot that was not originally designed to be tracked. If you wish to also track rotation, perspective and shear you need even more clear and consistent points to track.
Traditional roto methodology would have you outline a shape with the minimum number of points necessary then either manually move the control points or track the shape with a point tracker to “get it close”. Even when using multi-point trackers to impart rotation and scale to the roto spline, the results are often unusable if there is any perspective change during the shot.
Instead, Imagineer’s Planar Tracker tracks an object’s translation, rotation and scaling data based on the movement of a user-defined plane.
A plane is any flat surface having only two dimensions, such as a table top, a wall, or a television screen. Planes provide much more detail to the computer about an object’s translation, rotation and scaling than is possible with point-based tracking tools. Even as an object leaves and enters a frame, there is usually enough information for the Planar Tracker to maintain a solid track of the object.
When you work with the mocha tools, you will need to look for planes in the clip. More specifically, you will need to look for planes that coincide with movements you want to track. If someone is waving goodbye, you can break their arm into two planes - the upper and lower limbs. Although not all of the points on the arm sections actually lie on the same two-dimensional surface, the apparent parallax will be minimal.
mocha 3.0.0; contains new functionality and major changes to workflow.
New features include:
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New layer tree system
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Ability to customise colour for both mattes and splines
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Project merging
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Bounding boxes for splines
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Multi-spline selection and modification
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Layer groups
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3D camera solver for After Effects and FBX Export
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Dope sheet for key manipulation
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Enhanced link tool to join points of separate layers
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Zooming into footage now shows individual pixels
This section covers a basic use guide to help you go through the new features. For more in-depth information, see the relevant sections of the manual.
You can now select and modify single or multiple layers at once using the bounding box.
The bounding box can select either multiple points from multiple splines in the same layer, or multiple layers.
Translation, Scale and Rotation and Distortion is all handled by selecting the right area of the box:
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Translation is handled by clicking and dragging any of the dotted lines on the box
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Scale is handled by clicking and dragging any of the corners or mid-points of the box. Holding alt will uniformly scale the selection while dragging
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Rotation is handled by clicking near one of the corners of the bounding box and dragging. You will know when you can rotate by the cursor change
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Distortion is handled by holding down CMD or Ctrl and dragging any of the handles of the bounding box.
You can turn off the bounding box with the "Show selection boxes" option on the tool panel.
Now you can handle large groups of layers with colour coding, multi-toggling and layer grouping.
You can select multiple layers by CMD/Ctrl clicking each layer to add to the selection, or choosing a layer then holding Shift and clicking a layer further down to select those layers and all the layers in between.
You can right-click any column heading in the layer panel and hide columns you don't need to see. These changes are saved to your current layout, so you can set up simpler views for different workflows.
We have added a new column to the layer panel to let you change the fill color of each layer separately and in groups
We have added a new column to the layer panel to let you change the spline color of each layer separately and in groups
To keep layer organisation tidy, you can now create groups of layers.
To create a group, right click the Layer Panel and choose New Group. You can then name the group and drag layers into it.
A group of layers can then be altered together in the following ways:
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View: Turning off the view icon of a group will hide all layers in that group. Turning it on again will restore the original view settings of the individual layers in that group
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Process: Turning off the Process icon of a group will disable tracking or rendering for all layers in that group. Turning it on again will restore the original process settings of the individual layers in that group
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Lock: Turning on the lock icon of a group will lock all layers in that group. Turning it off again will restore the original lock settings of the individual layers in that group
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Spline Color:Changing the stroke color of a group will set all layers in the group to that colour. This is a permanent change for all layers
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Fill Color:Changing the color fill of a group will set all layers in the group to that colour. This is a permanent change for all layers
IMPORTANT:Note that presently you cannot nest a group of layers inside another group. This will be implemented in a later version.
New keyboard shortcuts include:
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Nudge Layer/Spline by 1 pixel: The arrow keys Up, Down, Left or Right. Also diagonal shifting is available on numeric keypads with 1, 3, 7 and 9
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Nudge Layer/Spline by 10 pixels: Hold Shift when using the nudge arrows
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Jump frames: Hold CMD/Ctrl + Left or Right keys
You can now attach points of one layer to another layer using the join tool.
Selecting the tool, you then just drag a point to another point to link it to that layer. The point you drag to becomes the Master point.
You can move either point to move linked points. In order to detach the points again, right-click any point and choose Point|Break constraint
To help move and copy keys easily, we have added a new Dope Sheet accessible on the bottom left-hand side of the screen (between Parameters and the curve editor)
Currently this has limited functionality, but is being expanded in later builds:
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You can select any standard keys (filled) or group keys (hollow) and move them along the timeline.
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You can select any standard keys (filled) and copy them using CMD/Ctrl+C and paste them elsewhere using CMD/Ctrl+C
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Scale the timeline using the CMD/Ctrl+Scrollwheel
IMPORTANT:The dope sheet replaces keyframe timeline editing in the curve editor, which is now off by default. You can turn on the curve editor from the view menu.
You can now merge projects together using File|Merge Project...
Currently the main restriction on merging is it must be the same frame rate, aspect ratio and dimension, so this would generally only be used when working on the same set of frames across multiple artists.
Merging does not work for file previously saved in other versions.
The new camera solver uses planar tracking information to define a camera, then exports out an After Effect camera or FBX file with nulls to assist placement in a 3D scene.
IMPORTANT:You need to have the "mocha 3D track importer for AE.plugin" installed in your After Effects Plug-Ins folder to import the camera tracking data.
The process for tracking is different for Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) camera shots (where the camera is stationary but can move on it's axis and zoom), as compared to a moving camera that has perspective changes.
IMPORTANT:Once you have solved a camera, its keyframe information will be shown in the dopesheet. Please note this is not presently saved in the project.
See the Camera Solver section of the user guide for more details.
