Additional Details

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‌Additional Details

Here's how to figure out how many pins you need for a given configuration of the pinning tool. First, count up the number of degrees of freedom being calculated:

 two position on the screen,

 one roll angle,

 one distance from camera to object (except if Width, Depth, and Height are all being calculated),

 two pan and tilt angles,

 one, two, or three scaling axes (Width, Depth, and/or Height), and

 one field of view.

The order listed is the order in which they will begin to be calculated as you add additional pins. Each additional pin allows two more degrees of freedom to be computed. For example, with one pin only the 2D position will be calculated; with two pins the position, roll angle, and distance will be calculated; and a minimum of four pins are required to adjust an object fully in position and orientation and compute a field of view, assuming none of the axis scalings are being computed. Five pins are enough for anything, though additional pins may improve accuracy.

Once you've created pins, you can continue to adjust them to refine the positioning of your mesh.

 Drag an existing pin to move it to a better location.

 Shift-drag a pin to slide it on the surface of the mesh to a different location.

 While shift-dragging, hold down control also, to snap the pin's location onto the vertices of the mesh (control works during initial creation of the pin too).

 Control-click a pin to delete it.

To minimizing chasing round in circles, emphasize putting the 2D vertical portion of the crosshair in the right location, which is fixed, not the horizontal portion on the 3D mesh, which will change as you add more pins. Once you get enough pins, everything should line up properly, or close enough that you can make minimal final tweaks.

All the pins for a specific mesh "live" on a single frame of the shot. If you go to a different frame, you won't see them, and if you start creating new ones, you will delete the originals. To go to the correct frame where the pins are, click the "Jump to frame/Re-pin" button on the pinning toolbar (with the mesh selected).

Although the pinning tool principally concerns itself with meshes, if the mesh is part of a rigged structure, it moves the underlying moving/GeoH object that is the parent of the mesh. It does not change the mesh-to-parent positioning.

The pinning tool does not operate on child objects, ie the deformed portions of the mesh. To adjust those portions, adjust the lock values of the child GeoH objects.

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