Slapshot unveils AI camera tracking

Hotspring’s AI-powered VFX toolkit Slapshot has launched a professional-grade AI camera tracking tool.

It’s built for VFX artists and is designed to deliver precise camera solves and dimensionally accurate point clouds in a fraction of the time it takes with traditional methods.

It’s well suited to tasks such as background replacements, screen comps, sky swaps, and clean-ups.

“A track that might’ve taken a day or more to do manually can now be done in under 10 minutes,” says Hotspring co-founder and CEO 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 great solves with zero camera information – it’s literally just clicking the ‘Solve Camera’ button and we work out the rest.

“Slapshot isn’t intended to replace the need for expert tracking on heavy CG sequences. 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.”

The software outputs in .abc and .glb camera files, .exr STMaps, undistorted .jpg plates, and a .mov playblast – compatible with all major 3D tools.

As well as AI-powered camera tracking, Slapshot provides AI rotoscoping, generative retiming amd video depth maps. It supports resolutions up to 8K and eliminates the need for expensive hardware, says Hotspring.

Mason said: “There has always been a lot of interest from Slapshot users in a camera tracking solution, but it’s always been slightly out of reach. There isn’t much research that can take you end to end on this problem. But then we felt that the research had progressed in a few domains to the point where we could pull the pieces together and build something really special, so the stars just aligned. I think the result is really going to knock people’s socks off. No one has ever built anything like this before.” 

Hotspring managing director, Ben Stallard, adds: “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.”