From the course: Cinema 4D R20 Essential Training: VFX

Create a coordinates system - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

From the course: Cinema 4D R20 Essential Training: VFX

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Create a coordinates system

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- [Narrator] So far in this chapter, we have refined tracking data, and solved the camera. Before we go any further, I'm going to lock the solved data by just checking on this box here. And now we need to create a coordinate system for our scene so we can tell Cinema 4D which way is up, and get a sense of scale. And we do that by using the motion tracker tags. So the tags can be found here in the motion tracker tags, so we'd be looking at the planar, position, and vector constraints. But an easy way to access them is if you're in the motion tracker layout, you can see we've got access to them here. So we can click and hold, and we can then choose to create the position, vector, and planar constraint. So, first things first, I'm going to create a position constraint and I'm going to put it, I think, right here, and in fact what I want to do, before I do this, is switch over to my 3D view. And then I can just attach it to this null object. Now, this is going to tell Cinema 4D what world zero is. So any object we create will be created at this point here. Next, we're going to use the vector constraint, and we'll set this up by clicking here, and here, on those two nulls, and I'm going to say that's the x-axis, and that I know that to be around one meter. So, with that done, the final constraint is a planer constraint, so I will just add that by clicking here, maybe over here, and finally here. So, three points at the minimum, you can also use the picker to start adding more points, if you'd like, but I'm going to be quite satisfied with what we've got here. If we come over to our four views, you can now see we've got a better sense of what's going on, and a better sense of scale as well if we come out of this, you can see previously the camera was absolutely massive relative to everything, and it's not so large now. So, we'll come back into our perspective view, look through our solve camera, and just play through this. Now, this is all well and good, but we should really verify everything with some test Geometry. So, I'll come over, I'll pause the playback, and so what I did there to quickly switch between projects is just hold down the V key, which brings up the little menu here. And, you can then choose any of the open documents that you have, so, it's a very handy short cut, and we can copy and paste this marker, and use that same shortcut to switch back into our main scene. And because we've set up the position constraint, it will just be created at world zero. Now, I'd like to use a few more markers, so I'm going to Command + click and drag out a couple of copies, so we'll just drag out say three, maybe about four more copies. Now, they're all on top of each other, and I want to put them at different points at the scene, so I'm going to use the transfer tool. I'm going to quickly get that by pressing Shift + C to bring up the commander, and then type in transfer, and with my maker one selected, I'm going to transfer it over to this null object. With marker two selected, I'll transfer it over to this null. Marker three can come over to here, and let's just bring marker four over here. So, we've got a good spread of these markers in the scene. Let's play the scene back. And they appear to be sticking on rather nicely. So, we have now calibrated our scene using the motion tracker tags, and tested the solve with simple Geometry. When creating a coordinate system, it's useful to have some real world measurements, taken on location, or on-set, to avoid guesswork. So, bear that in mind when you're working on future shots.

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