The teller slides a plain brown box across the counter and tells me the total with a smile. I mirror it and hand over my card. In the brown box is a stack of tracking markers — the product of a brief flash of inspiration. If you’ve ever spent some time doing camera matching in Blender, you’ll know that it can be a boring, tedious process that’s wrought with false starts and disappointments.

A few well constructed, highly visible tracking marker can solve most of these headaches, and while one doesn’t always have control over the footage, when it’s possible to add them in, the effort-to-return ratio is immense.

I decided to try my hand at making up a marker with the (albeit limited) knowledge I have about camera tracking in Blender, OpenCV, and general image processing. In the interest of brevity, all of the important details are condensed in the image below:

I have not yet tested this marker, but I’ll be able to put it through the wringer in a short while. Until then, if you’d like to print your own and give it a whirl, I’ve included the full multi-resolution SVG here.