Camera Footage Projection

Requires the Max or Studio license

Camera Footage Projection creates a live, non-destructive front projection from a tracked camera background image, sequence, or movie clip onto a mesh.

How to use it

  1. 1 Assign the plate to a tracked camera background.
  2. 2 Choose the receiving mesh and projection camera.
  3. 3 Select the correct one-based background slot.
  4. 4 Optionally limit the material to a scene or camera-key frame range.
  5. 5 Choose Exact Emission or Lit Base Color.
  6. 6 Create or update the live projection.

Camera Footage Projection Panel

New in 1.0.7 · Max

Once you have a surface, you usually want it to carry the texture of your footage. This panel maps the camera background movie, image sequence, or still image onto the generated surface as a live, non-destructive front projection: choose the receiving mesh and the projection camera and click Create/Update Live Projection. The camera's own background footage is used, so the background slot in Extra Settings rarely needs changing.

What It Reproduces

  • •
    Animated camera transform, lens, shift, and orthographic scale through Blender's UV Project workflow.
  • •
    Camera background Fit, Crop, or Stretch, plus offset, scale, rotation, and horizontal/vertical flips.
  • •
    Emission or Principled (lit) material output, with the surface's original materials preserved and restorable.

Extra Settings

The background footage slot, a configurable active frame range (a Geometry Nodes gate enables the projection only over the intended frames), and shading options. Remove Projection deletes only the MotionMaster-managed nodes, modifiers, UV data, and materials.

Projection should use an undistorted plate and the matching solved camera. Blender cameras are ideal pinholes, so raw lens distortion is not represented and can misalign the image near the frame edges. Undistort with Heavy Tracking or the exported STMaps first. Because a live projection depends on the current camera position, use Multi-Frame Texture Bake below when the texture must stay correct from other viewpoints. Full guide: Camera Footage Projection.

Technical notes

The managed setup reproduces camera animation, lens, shift, orthographic scale, and camera-background Fit, Crop, Stretch, offset, scale, rotation, and flips. Existing polygon material assignments are preserved.

Use an undistorted plate because Blender cameras are ideal pinhole cameras. Dense receiving geometry improves UV interpolation, and the mesh must stay in front of the projector camera.

Remove Projection deletes only MotionMaster 3D managed nodes, modifiers, UV data, and materials. It does not alter unrelated surface materials.

Docs Point Cloud Surface

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Docs Lens Calibration and STMap Export

The Heavy Tracking lens workflow preserves the complete solved COLMAP camera model and exports portable calibration JSON plus float STMaps for undistorting the original plate and redistorting CG back into it.

Docs Multi-Frame Texture Bake

Multi-Frame Texture Bake fuses visible observations from one or more tracked camera plates into a permanent packed texture for static reflection, lighting, and shadow-catching geometry.

 Tutorial How to Add 3D Objects to Tracked Footage in Blender (HDRI, LiDAR and Shadow Catcher) Guide Planar tracking addon for Blender

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