Slapshot, the AI-powered VFX toolkit from Hotspring, has launched a professional-grade AI Camera Tracking tool designed to deliver precise camera solves and dimensionally accurate point clouds more quickly than using traditional methods.
Built specifically for VFX artists working in 2D compositing. “A track that might’ve taken a day or more to do manually can now be done in under ten minutes with Slapshot’s new Camera Tracking tool,” says Co-Founder and CEO of Slapshot Jon Mason.
“For people who don’t routinely work in 3D, camera tracking can be intimidating. It’s a very technical area, so it was really important for us to make it as simple yet powerful as possible. So we designed the tool to be able to produce a great solves with zero camera information,” says Mason. “Alternatively, for people who have camera information, you can also provide it and it will be respected and incorporated into the solve,” Mason adds.
Outputs are delivered in widely compatible formats – including .abc and .glb camera files, .exr STMaps, undistorted .jpg plates, and a .mov playblast – compatible with all major 3D tools.
Slapshot’s AI Camera Tracking is designed for the kinds of shots that make up the bulk of real-world compositing work: background replacements, screen comps, sky swaps, and clean-ups.
“Slapshot isn’t intended to replace the need for expert tracking on heavy CG sequences,” Mason explains. “But for those medium-difficulty shots where a 2D track isn’t enough, this is going to save artists hours, if not days, on every job. The speed-to-quality ratio is unlike anything else out there.”
Mason adds, “There’s no off-the-shelf way to do something like this. We were building something no one else had done before, so it required coordinating and contributing at the highest level of the open-source AI community to make it happen.”
Camera Tracking joins Slapshot’s growing suite of AI-powered tools designed to remove friction from the creative process and raise the quality of output across commercial, film, and episodic projects.
Slapshot was created by the team behind Hotspring – a VFX outsourcing platform used by studios around the world. Co-founders Jon Mason and Varun Parange, along with Managing Director Ben Stallard, have delivered high-end VFX across Oscar-, Emmy-, and VES-winning projects. Drawing on this experience, they built Slapshot to solve the most time-consuming challenges in post – giving studios and artists faster, smarter, production-ready tools that meet the real demands of modern VFX.
Hotspring Managing Director, Ben Stallard, concludes: “We built Slapshot to tackle the real-world problems artists face every day: the time-consuming tasks that eat into creative time and production budgets. Camera Tracking continues that mission – it takes a complex process and turns it into a ten-minute task, giving artists time back when it matters most.”
Pippa Considine
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