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Size Constraints

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โ€ŒSize Constraints

As well as the position and orientation of your scene, you need to control the size of the reconstructed scene. There are four general ways to do this:

๏‚ท With a distance (size) constraint between two points.

๏‚ท Have two points that are locked to (different) xyz coordinates, such as an origin (0,0,0) and a point at (20,0,0), as in the recommended three-tracker method described above,

๏‚ท From knowledge of the camera path (sometimes! carefully! if you know what you are doing!), or,

๏‚ท With an inter-ocular constraint for stereo shots.

If you want to use one collection of trackers to position and align the coordinate system, but use an on-set measurement between two other trackers, you can use a distance constraint.

Reminder : SynthEyes uses unit-less numbers. When you enter 20 units, you could call it 20 meters, 20 feet, 20 miles, etc. SynthEyes does not care; it is up to you.

Suppose you have two non- ZWT trackers, A and B, and for example want them 20 units apart. You set up the distance constraint as follows.

1. Open the coordinate system control panel.

2. Select tracker A, ALT-click (Mac: Command-click) on tracker B to set it as the target of A. In the coordinate system panel, you'll see tracker B's name now in the Target Point button. Note: if you have set the preferences to "no middle mouse button" then you must hold ALT/Command and right-click to link, since ALT/Command-left would be interpreted as a pan.

3. Set the distance (Dist.) spinner to 20. (You can remove a distance constraint by right-clicking the Target Point button.)

If you set up a distance constraint and have or will also use the *3 tool, use different trackers for the distance constraint and the *3 setup. Then, select the second point, which is locked to 20,0,0, and change its mode from Lock Point to On X Axis (On


Y Axis for front/back setups). Otherwise, you will have set up two size constraints simultaneously, and unless both are right, you will be causing a conflict.

Tip : If you have solved or seed coordinates on the two trackers A and B, you can alt-shift-click B to set a distance constraint on A equal to the current distance between A and B. This is useful to create a distance constraint between the two when youโ€™ve already manually scaled the scene, and want to lock that scale in for the future.

Note that your size constraint does not do anything immediately: it is an instruction to the solver, and will have no effect until you solve or re-solve (ie in Refine mode) the scene.

You can set up coordinate systems with *3 and use those points for distance constraints, but you'll have to understand how to set them up directly, as described in the next section.

ยฉ2026 Boris FX, Inc.ย โ€”ย UNOFFICIALย โ€”ย Converted from original PDF.


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