Tooling
Client
Open Source - Personal Project
Timeframe
Actively maintained
Year
2025
The situation
One of the highest-performing content formats in social media right now is fake out-of-home: brand experiences staged in the real world in impossible ways, giant products on landmarks, billboards that could never exist, built by tracking real footage and manipulating the scene in 3D. Platform research has repeatedly shown this format driving outsized views on Reels and Stories, which is why brands keep commissioning it.
The bottleneck of the entire format is the tracking: translating real-world camera movement and space into the 3D software, so product placement and scene manipulation sit convincingly in the shot. And here Cinema 4D, the tool a very large share of 3D motion creators work in, had a genuine gap. Photogrammetry-based camera tracking through COLMAP and GLOMAP has become the modern route to that solve, but C4D had no good native way to import it. Blender users had a well-known importer; C4D users were left rebuilding camera solves by hand, a multi-hour manual process of axis conversion, keyframe cleanup and scene setup.
I use this workflow myself. Rather than tolerating the gap, I closed it, publicly.
What I built
A Python importer for Cinema 4D that handles the entire pipeline:
Automatic axis conversion from COLMAP's coordinate space to Cinema 4D's
Sparse point cloud import with Matrix object setup
Redshift-compatible animated cameras, plus a constrained duplicate camera for flexible shot work
Automatic scene configuration: FPS, timeline range and render resolution taken from the solve
Released free on GitHub, with credit appreciated but not required.
This is not a portfolio toy. The tool has been used in real production: across several projects during my time at Bally's, tracking filmed footage for screen replacement and compositing work, and across my personal projects. The same importer serving a professional pipeline and a public community is the point.
Maintained, not abandoned
Shipping was the start, not the point. Version 1.2 fixed 360-degree rotation jumps with smooth heading, pitch and bank unwrapping, improved keyframe stability and camera motion smoothness, and confirmed full compatibility with the widely used AutoTracker and GLOMAP pipeline on both Windows and macOS. That release cut setup and cleanup time by roughly 70%, turning a multi-hour manual process into minutes.
Why this case matters
This is the smallest project on this site and one of the most revealing. It shows real software engineering, a shipped, versioned, maintained tool with a public user base, not a one-off script. It shows commercial instinct: the tool sits at the exact point where a high-demand content format, fake out-of-home, meets the software most 3D motion creators actually use, unlocking the format's hardest step for a whole community. And it is entirely verifiable: the code, the releases and the community using it are one click away.
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