2D plan onto Drone footage

[Gull Group]

I realise this has been asked before but I'm hopeful now that some years have passed this may have become easier to do.

I have a 2D top-down plan of a land subdivision that I need to overlay onto drone footage.

The big problems are as follows:

Land perimeter is very complex — not square.

Land has lots of undulation/fall-off — not flat.

I've played around with Boris FX Mocha but that gets very confused by the shape of the land even when the footage has been cut into shorter sequences.

To be honest I'm struggling to get the static plan to sit correctly on the footage without any movement.

Is there something I'm overlooking or is this strictly a job for visual effects pros? 

[Mylenium]

There is no way to do a simple 2D track on this. The shape's borders change all the time due to the parallax and if you were to apply, so would the "texture" due to self-overlap within the shape. It would probably be a lot more productive to just do a mask track on the borders and then rebuild the interior subdivisions using extra shape layers and masks. Since there are no proper markers, a lot of that would involve eyeballing to make it at least look nice. It will never be 100% exact. Otherwise this has "full 3D geometry track and scene reconstruction" written all over it and that's for Nuke and Syntheyes, not mocha and AE. If you have 3D data for the terrain, of course there may ba a way to use the GeoLayers plug-in or do it in a 3D program. In any case, just slapping on your PNG as a decal will never work.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

Corner Pin tracking in Mocha AE is probably the best option. I don't know for sure where the image lines up with the plot but I got this in about 15 minutes:

You can find Mocha Corner Pin tracking tutorials here: Boris FX Training

You'll just have to figure out how to orient the image first, scale it to fit the comp, pre-compose, and then line up the Surface in Mocha.

[Mylenium]

That drift's like crazy and probably isn't that useful. Just sayin'...

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

One pass, no track adjustment...

I do this kind of thing all the time.

[Gull Group]

Thank you, that seems like the best avenue to spend my time — anything more advance would likely take me far too long and would be better off outsourcing to professionals.