Documentation

MotionMaster 3D docs

Track Workspace, AdjustTrack, and Add To Existing Camera

The Track Workspace is the dedicated window behind Planar Tracking. It has its own layer list, shape tools, timeline, curve editor, and Output panel, so every surface in a shot lives in one project. AdjustTrack fixes a drifting solve by hand without overwriting it, Track Error (Measured) shows where a track really struggles, and Add To Existing Camera lets one solved camera carry as many surfaces as the shot needs.

Workflow steps

  1. Click Open Track Workspace in the Planar & Tripod Trackers panel, or Open Saved Workspace... to resume a shot. Reopening any single layer file restores every layer that belonged to the workspace.
  2. Draw a shape for each surface you want to track. Each surface is a layer; layers above can hold out the layers below, so a foreground sign can be excluded from the wall track behind it.
  3. Track a layer forward, backward, or both. Watch the Track Error (Measured) curve: flat and low means locked, a spike means look at that frame.
  4. Where a corner has slipped, enable AdjustTrack, place reference points on the corners of the selected shape, and drag them to the true positions on the frames that need it. Toggle the correction off at any time to see the raw solve.
  5. Publish the first layer as Camera Motion to get a solved camera, or as Object Motion to get a camera-parented animated plane.
  6. Track another surface in the same shot, tick Add To Existing Camera, and publish. The new surface lands as a static plane inside the camera the first layer already produced.

Important details

A workspace owns one folder per shot. Every layer is created as its own subfolder and a track_workspace.json manifest records the layer list. Where several manifests reference the same sequence, the most complete one wins, so a stale single-layer manifest can no longer shadow a full workspace. The tracked surface is always drawn; when the Surface viewer toggle is off it becomes a subtle dashed outline rather than disappearing, so you never publish a surface you did not look at.

AdjustTrack is a non-destructive correction layer. Reference points seed on the corners of the active shape and are animated by hand; the correction is expressed in the track's own reference space and applied when the layer is evaluated or published, while the raw solve stays authoritative on disk. Corrections are idempotent: publishing, reopening the workspace, and republishing apply them exactly once, and a corrected publish is never re-imported as manual keyframes.

Track Error (Measured) warps each enabled shape back onto its reference patch and scores it with masked ZNCC; the reported error is the mean across shapes, frames below 50 percent coverage are skipped, and an AdjustTrack correction visibly lowers the curve. It replaces solver confidence as the diagnostic for finding where a track fails, because confidence decays with distance from the reference frame by construction.

Add To Existing Camera treats the existing camera's animated poses as ground truth. Every tracked corner becomes a multi-view triangulation, the four corners are solved as a single plane so the result is planar by construction, and the surface is parented to that camera's depth rig so Plane Depth keeps moving surface and camera together. Only frames both layers genuinely tracked are used; gap-filled hold frames are excluded. The other layer's camera is never re-keyed, renamed, or deleted.

The attach publish is honest about failure. A camera that barely translates cannot place a new surface in depth, so the publish stops rather than returning geometry at an arbitrary depth. If the best possible static surface still misses this layer's track, the publish stops and reports the measured error and the shared frame range; where the cause is focal length, it names the focal length at which the two layers agree so the camera layer can be republished with that value. Track both layers across the same stretch of frames for the most certain result.