Making Adjustments
Now you just need to align the camera. The Movie Clip Editor still offers you a couple of tools to do this, but you can also do it manually. Let’s use the Movie Clip Editor tool to align the camera motion:
1. Select three markers in the footage that are placed on the floor and, on the Orientation panel of the Solve tab, click the Floor button in the Movie Clip Editor. Blender will align the camera and all the markers in a way that those 3 markers are on the floor, completely horizontal.
2. To define the scale of the scene, select two markers in the 3D scene (it’s better if you know the distance between them in the real scene, or you can at least make a guess). Now, on the Orientation panel of the Solve tab, in the Distance field, insert the distance between the two selected markers in the real scene. Click Set Scale and the camera with all the markers will scale to reflect that measurement.
3. Click Set as Background in the Scene Setup panel on the Solve tab in the Tools Region of the Movie Clip Editor. The current footage will be applied as a background to the Camera view (press Ctrl + NumPad 0 to look at the scene from the active camera). Make sure it fits with your scene.
4. Align the camera manually until your 3D objects fit in the background footage as you prefer. Usually, a good way to do this is to place the 3D cursor in the origin of the scene (or where you have a 3D object placed on the floor, such as the character), and rotate, move, and scale the camera from there until it’s aligned (see Figure 13.5).
Tip
At this point, you could click the Setup Tracking Scene button right under the button for Set as Background in the Movie Clip Editor. This option would create the nodes in the compositor, as well as the render layers and anything else you might need to make the character cast shadows on the floor. But you’ll learn how to do this all yourself manually in the next chapter so you understand the process and you can adjust it as you want.