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Curve Tuning
Once the curve has been roughed into place, you’re ready to “tune” it to place it more accurately along the edge. Of course, you can do this all by hand, and in adverse conditions, that may be necessary. But it is much better to use the automated Tune tool.
You can tune either a single frame, with the Tune button, or all of the frames using of course the All button. When a curve is tuned on a frame, the curve control points will latch onto the nearby edge.
For this reason, before you begin tuning, you may wish to create additional control points along the curve, by shift-clicking it.
The All button will bring up a control panel that controls both the single- and multi-frame tuning. If you want to adjust the parameters without tuning all the frames, simply close the dialog instead of hitting its Go button.
You can adjust to edges of different widths, control the distance within which the edge is searched, and alter the trade-off between a large distant edge, and a smaller nearby one. Clearly, it is going to be easier to track edges with no nearby edges of similar magnitude.
The control panel allows you to tune all frames (potentially just those within the animation playback range), only the frames that already have keys (to tune your roughed-in frames), or only the frames that do not have keys (to preserve your previously-keyed frames).
You can also tell the tracking dialog to use the tuned locations as it estimates (using splining) where the curve is in subsequent frames, by turning on the Continuous Update checkbox. If you have a simple curve well-separated from confounding factors, you can use this feature to track a curve through a shot without roughing it in first. The drawback of doing this is that if the curve does get off course, you can wind up with many bad keys that must be repaired or replaced. [You can remove erroneous keys using Truncate.] With the Continuous Update box off, the tuning process is more predictable, relying solely on your roughed-in animation.
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