Advanced OBJECT TRACKING and POWER MESH Tutorial in After Effects

hey hello come to this really fun tutorial about the motion because today I'm going to show you well how to track your head so just follow me into After Effects yes yes I need to warn you of course you will learn a lot today but it will also be very disgusting I'm going to split this into two parts so the first dragging our heads in 3D space with an object track so we can attach 3D objects to it and I will show you how to do it with element 3D but also how you can do all of this natively in After Effects and second we will mesh track our skin so we can add blood and gore and well all the disgusting stuff but why two different methods this is because the arrow has a single 3D point where it hits our skin but our skin itself bends and warps and with this method you can do so much more for example digital makeup so the object track basically tracks our skull and the mesh our skin to not waste any of your time I created two bookmarks for you for both parts of the tutorial and hey by the way this is exactly the workflow you would use professionally so we used it for example in The Walking Dead for hundreds of zombie face tricks for this famous opening scene in season 6 we had the zombie in full costume almost everything you see is all done practically and all we added was the arrow and the blood to his head with the help of After Effects and an object track so let's get started here in After Effects I have my clip I filmed it on green screen but you really don't have to it's not even making the process simpler so really you can film wherever you want okay and now let us directly open up our object tracker and I'm using the Geo Tracker from Keen tools for this and unfortunately this is not possible without the Geo Tracker there really is no other method within after effects of object tracking and yes I see the comments already [Applause] but I am well prepared I will give away free licenses for the tracker for the comments that describe the best use case for this so if you need it you will get it so once applied it will start analyzing the clip and depending on the clip this could take some time and since we are super lazy and I want to finish work early today let's jump to the second part of this tutorial the mess tracker right now while waiting remember being lazy is the clever way of being stupid so let's drag the footage on the new composition icon and apply the mocha Pro effect to this and if you think this is useful and you want to have mocha Pro then there's a link for you in the video description that will take off 15 of your order so let's launch the program by hitting the mocha logo within the effect now what do we want to do we want to track something over here and maybe here and also over here and maybe also my nose so we could do one two three four tracks and get this done but we are really super lazy today so let's just track everything simply create a spline around with everything we potentially want to track now let's also enable the mesh option in the motion tab so this automatically shows us the mesh we would track now would yes because we could use a few more details while tracking so let's set it from automatic to uniform and click on generate mesh again and we have way more detail and if you wish you can always make the mesh size even smaller to get finer detail so now let's just click on track forward and once done there's just one more step we need to do in here we need to know which will be our reference frame meaning which frame we will use in After Effects to add all the digital makeup to and for me this is the first frame as it is pretty straight to the camera so let's go to that frame and set our planar surface with this button here to the frame this means now the mesh track is aligned to that frame and you could do that on any frame you wish of course and now let's just save and close mocha in After Effects we can now work on our digital makeup so I use some footage elements from action VFX for that and there's also a link to their library in the video description and if you use that link you also support my channel and for some stuff like my nose I simply create a black solid and one in a grayish white bone color and voila really ugly so maybe a purple solid blending mode set to color and mask around my eye perfect or well whatever you want to call it plot a super important part you don't want to miss this remember that we made the first frame our reference frame within mocha so we do the same here we use this Frame the first one and pre-compet now the first frame in After Effects is aligned to the first frame in mocha okay so now we have all the mesh Distortion data stored in this effect on this layer but we want to have it on this layer well simply copy the effect and paste it onto here and we want to see the rendered version of our Masterpiece but at the moment nothing is tracking so let's simply enable render and for the module let's choose what we want to see in the warp obviously and yes we are already done with part 2 of our tutorial part one was analyzing and should be finished by now and indeed it has finished so let's check some geometry and we want to track the head of course so we don't even have to load a head model because there's one already pre-made for us in The Primitives and we can also choose what we want to track and select the fitting Parts over here now simply align the head to your head by simply clicking and tracking on the mesh ears nose and whatever makes you happy and now let's check click on open toolbar which brings out the tracking Tab and click on track forward hey this button is only clickable once it has analyzed so now it makes sense that we have done that already without wasting any time [Applause] okay and wherever the track is off simply readjust it and if you need to go back and adjust something all you need to do is click on refine all so after effects will recalculate everything for you with the new keyframes in mind and if you only added one in between keyframe just click on refine so it will refine everything to the closest keyframes to the new one now that the track is finished let's export it so go to export and surface point because we want to have a specific point on the surface okay and Link is already enabled which is super powerful because if we want to adjust or fine tweak the track later on the null will take over those adjustments as well so let's click on export null and now we can select a specific point in exactly that position is created in 3D space now we have again two options first if you have element 3D installed apply element to a layer go to scene setup go to create and add a tube and simply adjust the radius hey and choose from bottom over here in this way its Anchor Point is at the bottom which is exactly where we want to have the arrow attached to our head now let's also add a cone and scale it down on its individual axis in the material I make this one brownish for wood and the feathers maybe reddish hey and of course you could spend more than just 10 seconds of your time to do this but I guess you get the point and now we need transform controls for this so let's create a specific null for this and element has this specific button under utilities now we have a null object that controls the transform data of the arrow perfect and all we need to do now is parent this null to the tracking null and set its values to zero so it is aligned to that now and well done and yes in element you can simply enable and add motion blur but I also want to show you how to do it without element 3D and believe me or not but if you are using the beta version of After Effects which by the way is completely free if you have the standard version just install it in the Creative Cloud app and now you can import 3D objects so let's do exactly this I import this Broken Arrow as a parented through the trekkenol and voila we have a 3D Arrow as simple as that but unfortunately no motion blur yet but a simple pixel motion blur effect on an adjustment layer on top will do the trick and hey this as well as the element 3D version reacts to light so as in my example I have my main light over here so let's add a point light there and an ambient light to brighten up everything just a little bit hey and we are good to go so let's just quickly copy over the blood elements that we created earlier I will add a few more arrows and with that result let's go to the audition for the next season of The Walking Dead or simply have fun with object tracking in After Effects [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: flomotion

Views: 187,078

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, power mesh, object track, object tracking, mocha pro, mocha, object, 3d track, native 3d, 3d, 3d in after effects, new features after effects, advanced, beginner, geotracker, geo tracker, keen tools, keentools, mesh, generate mesh, pro, skin, skull, the walking dead, twd, zombie, making of, before and after, face track, head track, vfx, arrow, element3d, videocopilot, element, camera track, obj, gltf, blood, digital makeup, makeup, action vfx, afvx, ai

Id: cHGH8aBJLz0

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023