the most annoying thing in smoke is doing backward offset-tracking. How to do it the right way ? it seems to be too complicated than it should be. In Nuke i ussually can track from any frame and can offset the reference to any pattern at any frame freely. I can’t find something like that in Smoke. One solution is reverse the clip first, but that’s not always the solution.

Andi
FreeNukerz

Yes. It’s old tech. It’s rock solid but old. Not sure if they dare to touch the code it’s been like that for ages :-) Changing reference when tracking backwards should really be possible I agree.

Sounds like a job for desktop Action. 

Reverse clip, track in desktop Action, reverse back.  One of the many workarounds; been that way forever.  These tools need to be updated, especially if they expect you to do all of your work in CFX.

Steve Beecher
Flame Artist
Disney ABC Television

I think it’s about time they update the tracker. It used to be so good and it had no competition really. That was then. We oldies also got tired of complaining and had to move on, jobs needed to be finished. We came up with all of these workarounds that really, when you sit back and look at it, are quite insane. Now when people are seeing this with fresh eyes and perhaps the whole “ecosystem” with all it’s UI changes has gone a bit out of balance, things like this come up.
You start wondering how we could put up with this for so long? There weren’t many alternatives to choose from. At least if you wanted something that could cope with client attended sessions. Also we understood that if you look at each tool under a looking glass they weren’t always the best but as a whole Discreet products would kill everything else and you could always do what you wanted, so you accepted a few flaws and came up with weird solutions to solve things.
This has changed now. Client attended isn’t THAT important no more. People work in teams solving things together instead of one glorified flame-op doing it all. And other software packages has gotten a lot stronger so the competition is harder than ever. I think the move AD did to give “high-end to the masses” is probably a good thing. There is still something strong with one super app and it can perhaps find other other areas of use. But moving to another user base that is used to accomplish things with multiple apps also means Smoke gets compared with the best tools of each discipline. So when the dust has settled with this UI overhaul it’s probably a good idea to look closely at all of the old tools and see what can be done better. I’d rather see that happen than having one more stereo tool or other pumped up 3d feature you don’t use anyway. No, it’s the basic stuff that we use everyday that need to be the best.
Sorry for the long and boring post. Just wanted to give a little background history to those of you who haven’t worked in Smoke/Flame before.

A planar tracker would be nice too.