Drawing Grids

The From and To grids control the area and extent of the warp or morph, so drawing accurate grids around the feature you intend to warp can improve the result. You can link the From and To grid before drawing your grid or copy points between grids using the copy and paste buttons.

The grids covers the entire input image by default, but in most cases you'll want to confine the warp to an area of interest in the image.

Enable the Draw Boundary

tool and then click and drag in the Viewer to describe the shape of the grid.

Tip: If you want to see your grid in the context of the whole image, set the Background control to Src, otherwise the rest of the image is masked out.

You can then use the Insert

and Delete

tools to add and remove columns and rows until you have the required grid.

Tip: If you prefer, you can use the subdivide buttons to quickly add columns and rows to multiple selections.

Link the From and To grids before adjusting the points by clicking the link

icon in the node Properties panel. This ensures that both grids have the same starting point after tracking, allowing you to visualize the warp more easily.

If you want to keep the grids separate for now, you can always copy the keyframes from one to the other using the and paste buttons.

Enable the Edit

tool to start adjusting the points in the grid to the features in the image. The tangent handles associated with each point can help you to fit the grid to the feature more accurately.

Generally, more accurate grids produce better results, so it's worth taking some time to match the grid to the feature you're warping.

You can control how points appear in the Viewer using the label and overlay buttons:

• - enable to display a transform handle overlay on all selected points, allowing you to transform them all at once.

• - enable to display x,y labels on points selected in the grid.

• - enable to display the grid a point belongs to, its color, and locked state when you hover over it.

Proceed to Tracking Using the Tracker Node if you don't have access to NukeX or Nuke Studio's SmartVector node,

Tracking Using SmartVectors if you do have SmartVector data.

Note: SmartVector data can be written out to .exr files and used in vanilla Nuke, you don't have to calculate the vectors in context. See Generating Motion Vectors for more information.