Introduction#

The Maya MatchMove Solver (or mmSolver for short), is a tool to MatchMove cameras and objects in Autodesk Maya. The mmSolver takes a different approach than most other software (Commercial or Free Open Source Software).

Most other software will calculate a 3D camera or 3D object track by throwing away the initial camera/object trajectory, and creating the solve brand new each time. This technique can be very efficient in some cases, however sometimes you wish to incrementally build a solve, by animating a rough solve first, and giving that as a ‘hint’ to the solver; “the camera should be moving approximately like this, now refine it.”

In addition to incremental solving, a common limitation of other software, is the inability to represent complex relationships of objects, such as object hierarchy, line constraints or plane constraints. mmSolver can model all of these types of constraints and relationships using Autodesk Maya’s DAG nodes and connections.

Finally, mmSolver also allows solving of specific attributes of any node, so you can solve only Translate X, Rotate Y or Scale Z independently, or any combination of attributes all at the same time. Even custom attributes are supported. Animated attributes can be solved as well as static attributes, meaning a Camera Translate Z attribute may be solved animated while solving the non-animated Camera Focal Length.

mmSolver allows all of these features and more!

Use Cases#

  • Solving camera or object transforms based on 2D to 3D positions.

  • Using DAG hierarchies to solve objects in specific spaces (for example object or camera space).

  • Generation of 3D positions from 2D screen-space positions.

  • Reconstruction of multi-camera shooting environments (photogrammetry).

  • 3D Camera Solving with no known 3D positions.

  • Camera line up and Lens Calibration using a single view (no parallax) using straight lines in the image.