I have some footage that I would like to do tracking within houdini, but can't figure out how to get the avi into houdini, I wonder if there is a node that could bring in avi, mpeg, quicktime etc files into Houdini. That would be great!
Didn't see a node in either chops or cops that seemed that this could be done.
Also is there a motion tracking node in chops or cops?? excuse my ingorance, lol.

there are no tracking tools in Houdini

and there is no support for avi files…convert it to frames (tif etc)

Hi effectspanda!!


What you would need might be these:

http://www.virtualdub.org/ [virtualdub.org]
With that tool you can convert your videos to and from image sequences

additionally you could see need for

http://avisynth.org [avisynth.org]

which is not an application, but kind of a scripted frame server.

And finally you would need the VooDoo tracker from

http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/download.html [digilab.uni-hannover.de]

it is free, but not open source, and only likes TARGA (*.tga)

Additionally try hunting down icarus (The Grand-grand-father of PFTrack) using your favorite search engine. (This could be really a hard one…)

I have not yet tried to do it myself, but it surely is doable, especially, if you are more skilled than me is. Me is not really good yet.

That was the “zero budget lotsa work” approach.

Or if your purse is big enough, you can try the already named PFtrack, Syntheyes, Boujou, which should also have a direct export to houdini.


Well, it's a starting point anyway…

HTH !!