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‌Exporting

Once you've completed tracking, you'll want to transfer the final tracking data to your animation or 3-D compositing package. SynthEyes offers a wide variety of exporters, depending on the software involved, accessed via the File/Export menu. See the "Exporting to Your Animation Package" section of the main SynthEyes User Manual.

Depending on the situation, various exports may be more or less appropriate.

Note to Demo Users: While the number of frames containing actual data are limited in the demo version, the format and overall hierarchy is the same as in the full produect. SynthEyes itself is best for evaluating tracking; whether all data is exported or not is just a detail. Once you've exported 50 numbers, what's 500 or 5000 more?

If your scene contains only basic non-hierarchical geometry tracking, then virtually all exporters will be suitable, as long as they export moving objects, not just camera tracks (only a few limited-function target apps may fall in that category).

If your scene contains geometric hierarchy tracking, but no deformation, you can also use any exporter that can handle moving objects. In the downstream app, the individual components will be present, though not linked into a hierarchy.

If your scene contains full hierarchical tracking, including deformations, then you'll need one of the exporters that support hierarchy and point caches. Point caches specify the animated position of each vertex within the mesh, unlike simple mesh formats such as LWO or OBJ.

The Filmbox FBX format is the overall most functional export format, widely supported throughout the industry. It supports shot imagery setup, object hierarchy, and point caches in two formats. It does have the limitation that it does not support animated normals. Filmbox should generally be your first choice.

The Alembic format is a strong choice for hierarchy and animated meshes, including animated normals, but does not support shot setup: there's no way for SynthEyes to automatically configure the shot imagery as a background. And unfortunately when people have to do that manually, they frequently make mistakes.

Note : SynthEyes produces up-to-date Alembic files using the "Ogawa" Alembic format, which features smaller size and higher performance than the original Alembic specification. If your animation software hasn't been updated in a while, it may not be able to read current Alembic files.

Universal Scene Description (USD) files are a comparatively new replacement for Filmbox and Alembic files. SynthEyes’s USD export is quite feature complete, including full export for rigs, the export of shot imagery for image sequences, and integrated animated vertex, normal, and texture coordinate effects. (See the section on USD in the User Manual.)

The Blender exports supports export of the hierarchy and the point cache. So that's a good choice... if you're using Blender! (Again, no animated normals for Blender.)

For full details of each exporter, please see the corresponding reference section of this manual, or the corresponding sub-section of "Exporting to Your Animation Package" in the main user manual.

Once the scene has been exported to your animation package, you may want to consider using the software's native bones deformation system to do the mesh deformation instead, using the SynthEyes-provided bones motions,

In the future, we may add additional full GeoH exports, but principally the emphasis should rightly be on ensuring that the developers of downstream packages adequately support the standardized Filmbox and Alembic formats. If a software package is unable to fully support Filmbox or Alembic, it is likely that the software is fundamentally unable to support underlying concepts such as point caches.

Note : You can apply an exported vertex cache to a mesh within SynthEyes, ie you can bake the animation to a vertex cache, then use the baked version in SynthEyes. It's best to apply the vertex cache to a copy of the mesh, however!

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