Correcting Lens Distortion

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‌Correcting Lens Distortion

Most animation software assumes that the camera is perfect, with no lens distortion, and the camera’s optic axis falls exactly in the center of the image. Of course, the real world is not always so accommodating.

SynthEyes offers several methods to determine the lens distortion, based on calibration grid images, by straightening curved lines that are straight in the real world, or as a result of the solving process, if enough reliable trackers are available.

SynthEyes accommodates the distortion, but your animation package probably will not. As a consequence, a particular workflow is required that we will introduce shortly and in the section on Lens Distortion.

The image preprocessor system lets distortion be removed, though after doing so, any tracking must be repeated or corrected, making the manual distortion determination more useful for this purpose.

The image preprocessor dialog offers spinners to set the distortion to match that determined. A Scale spinner allows the image to be scaled up or down a bit as needed to compensate for the effect of the distortion removal.

You can animate the distortion coefficients and scale to correct for varying distortion during zoom sequences.

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