After Effects Cyberpunk Implant VFX | Boris FX PowerMesh Tutorial

all right let's do this hey guys and welcome to another very exciting visual effects tutorial in this video i want to show you how you can very easily add bruises tattoos or cyberpunk implants to people's faces replace text and logos on moving clothes perform beauty work change someone's age and much much more now it's always been fairly easy to track flat planar surfaces using tools such as mocha pro to do screen inserts replace text and logos or remove objects and people from moving shots there's some great tutorials for those things online i'm going to drop you some links down below however trekking warped as in non-planar surfaces like someone's distorting face or a moving t-shirt has always been pretty difficult the new power mesh feature in the recently released 2021 version of mocha proof emboss of x now makes that task super simple as well in this tutorial i want to show you how to use this cool new tool within adobe after effects to track my oogie face and attach a cyberpunk implant to it now before we get into it full frontal disclaimer this video is sponsored by boris fx virus fx makes some of the biggest industry-leading video effects and tools from the academy award-winning planet tracker moca to the sapphire continuum effects collections silhouette and optics these tools are used by video professionals and enthusiasts all over the world they work with most of the popular video editing tools out there and borax fx offers lots of different licensing options to suit your needs go and check out all of the awesome stuff they have on their website and if you do decide to get in on the fun you can use my custom coupon code surfaced studio in one word to knock 15 off the final price but now i feel like i've waffled on for long enough let's finally jump into the tutorial [Music] welcome to the exciting world of adobe after effects i have a brand new empty project here and i've already imported all of the files into this project now as always if you do want to follow along you will be able to download all of these files from my website so simply go to surfacestudio.com forward slash downloads and you will be able to grab all of these files to get started let's grab the tobiius mirror.mp4 file and drop it onto the new composition icon now this is just a really simple shot of me looking into the mirror and having some issues with my cyberpunk implant which right now obviously isn't there now i've already done a little bit of work on this shot i've removed the reflection of the camera and inserted some ui hut sci-fi elements into the backdrop or using mocha pro and if you want separate tutorials for that just leave me some comments down below in this tutorial i really want to focus on inserting that cyberpunk implant onto the side of my face and the challenge with that is that my face isn't flat and i'm scrunching up the face as well as i'm having some issues with that implant but we are going to use the new power mesh feature in mocha pro to solve all of that for us for that let's come into the effects and presets panel and let's search for mocha pro and apply it to the tobius mirror layer then in the effects controls simply press onto the big mocha button to launch mocha pro here we are in mocha pro 2021 and this is the shot that i want to track and i now want to find a frame where my face isn't fully distorted so maybe around about frame 4 12 right here and zoom in a little bit and then i wanted to find a shape around the side of my face so let's select the create x spline tool and i'm going to draw a shape around the side of my face including just a little bit of the edge of the ear don't include the bottom of my chin because the power mesh tool is actually quite sensitive going to go across the face a little bit maybe just like this and do note that this isn't planar my face isn't a flat surface but the power mesh tool will deal with all of that for us now i don't actually want to track the eye itself i'm not going to add the implant over that anyways but also because my eyes kind of sunk into the face i don't really want to track that area so i'm going to come up to the create x by 2 click and hold and i'm going to select the add 2x spline tool with that layer still selected i'm not going to draw another one right about the eye maybe just right about there maybe bring it in just a little bit and this will be the area where we won't have the implant but also i don't really want to track this area so i want to exclude it from this shape and if you now show your mats we can't just cut that shape out right there let's also rename this layer to face track let's zoom out just a little bit and now let's get to the tracking and talk about power mesh in the track tab under motion you will have your usual check boxes for translation scale rotation shear i also want to enable perspective and now you have a new option called mesh i also want to enable that and mocha pro is going to generate a mesh within our shape to essentially track the subplanar movement and all of the distortions that happen within this pixel area now for power mesh we actually have a number of different options that sit under the mesh generation in the track tab the generation mode right now is set to automatic which means mocha is going to try to find the most contrast rich areas and generate a mesh based on that but you can also select uniform which by default won't do anything because you will always have to regenerate your mesh if you change any of these parameters if you now press generate mesh this is going to generate a very uniform mesh you can also determine whether you want any points on the splines if you disable that and generate the mesh no points will sit outside of the spline that you've defined but i'm just going to leave that on for now and regenerate my mesh because i want a few extra points around the outside the other thing you can do is you can also lower the mesh size if you need more detail right now it's set to 32 so if we lower this to let's say maybe 20 and hit generate mesh we're going to get a much finer mesh and you can control this however detailed you need it for your particular surface now i don't need it to be quite that fine i'm actually going to go back up to maybe around 30 hit generate mesh but i do know that i've got some wrinkles and some more deformation happening just around the corner of my eye so what you can also do you can actually go in and modify this mesh yourself in the top toolbar you'll find an option to edit the track mesh if you enable that over on the right hand side you also have an option to add new checkpoints i'm going to enable that as well and now i can click and drag on existing points to move them and i'm actually just going to create a little bit of a ring shape around the eye i'm just going to give it a little bit more space here and if you click on any lines between points you can add new points you can add a bit more detail into your spline let's just add a little bit of detail here on the bottom left-hand side of my eye because i know i've got some happiness lines as i like to call them so i just want to add a little bit more detail so we're catching all of the wrinkles as i'm crunching up my face right there and again you can go into as much detail as you want to let's zoom out just a little bit and that is looking pretty good i'm going to return to the selection tool and before we start tracking i just want to quickly talk about smoothness so mesh tracking has a smoothness option the higher your smoothness is the more the mesh will actually just follow the planar track that's defined by our shape that's underlying all of the sub planar movements so it will be a more stiff mesh if you lower your smoothness to something really low the mesh will warp deform really strongly to really just match the pixel area that you're tracking and this is great if you're tracking you know fast moving flags or waves whereas i probably go around about maybe 50 maybe a little bit more 55 to 60 or something because facial implants would probably be a little bit on the stiff side but with all of that setup now let's start tracking backwards and keep an eye on what happens with this mesh as i track through this you can see how the mesh within the spline that we've defined warps and transforms to match the movement of my face let's zoom out a little bit and check this out and you can really see how that mesh deforms with the movements of my face that's looking really good let's come to frame 412 and let's just track this forward and at the end here probably maybe around about there just before the cursor runs off the side of my screen let's just set the endpoint for that face track and yeah especially here you can really see how the mesh follows the movement of my skin as it distorts now before we can insert anything using this mesh track the one thing we need to do is we need to stabilize the footage around this mesh distortion for that let's come into the stabilized tab and don't worry that the frame jumps down it's because by default it stabilizes based on the first frame but we want to come to our frame 412. now on the bottom left-hand side in the stabilized tab just click plus underneath the frame list to add that as our reference frame everything will snap right back in place now the next thing i want to do is i want to enable warping based on this mesh that we've tracked so let's enable mesh warp leave it on unwarp and then change the quality from draft over to high let me just quickly hide all overlay so you can see what's happening now if i now scrub through my footage you will see that the side of my face that we tracked with the mesh is going to be stabilized and steady while everything else around it distorts this now allows us to paint on modify or insert things on the piece that we've tracked and then by warping it matching it back to the movement of my face so let's do that in adobe after effects let's save the project and return to adobe after effects and the first thing i want to do to make sure i have the same reference frame go to frame 412 in your timeline and with the layer selector press start to set a marker this is the reference frame that we've used in mocha pro for our mesh track and this is going to be important because this is the frame we need to align our implants or any overlays with so let's come back to the project let's grab the cyberpunk implant base png drag that into our composition and this is now the actual overlay now right now it really doesn't sit where i want it to sit so i'm going to scale down this layer kind of place it over my face exactly where i want it to be and again feel free to insert anything you want or modify it now it doesn't quite sit well perspectively so i'm actually going to come into my effects and presets panel and search for cc power pin let's apply that to this layer i'm just going to adjust the implant a little bit so it looks like it's perspectively sitting properly within that frame on my face with all of that done let's reselect the cyberpunk implant base and let's pre-compose it i'm going to call it cyberpunk implant base comp make sure you move all attributes into the composition and hit ok so now this is a single layer that fills the entire frame of this implant sitting on my face let's come back to the tobius mirror layer i'm just quickly going to rename it as well let's select the mocha pro effect press ctrl command c to copy it and paste it onto the cyberpunk implant base comp let's expand the matte options within the mocha pro effect and you can now enable to view the matte which is showing the shapes but also the cutout for the eye that we had here let's untick that i actually want to apply the mat which is going to cut out the part around the eye i usually like to add a little bit of feather maybe just a two depending on how sharp you want the edges of that implant to look let's expand the module renders option the module i want to render is stabilize warp because again we're stabilized unwarping it in mocha so now we've added something to it we now want to warp it so that this implant follows the movement on the side of my face i'm going to change the walk quality over to high let's enable render and nothing happens but that's also because we're sitting on the reference frame if we jump to another frame you can now see that this cyberpunk implant is actually following the movement as well as the rotation on my face and all of the little distortions as i scrunch and distort my face let's remind the composition and play it back you can see how this implant now sticks to the side of my face and it was really easy and this is really the power of power mesh it makes it super easy to track warping and distorting surfaces so you can add things to them or modify them like i could easily take all my wrinkles out or repaint things on or do whatever i wanted with this now this isn't a terribly great cyberpunk implant effect just yet so let's make this look a little bit nicer first i'm going to change the blend mode on my cyberpunk implant base comp over to multiply i'm also going to lower the opacity to maybe around 85-ish percent i just want it to be not quite so strong also do note that power mesh does not yet support motion blur so if you want motion blur you can either add cc force motion blur to that layer which is inbuilt into adobe after effects the one i personally prefer is actually from boris fx and it's called bcc motion blur it looks a little nicer and it renders much faster than the cc force motion blur but you can use either one for now however i'm just going to disable it while we're still working with the footage just because i don't want to slow anything down now the most notable issue with this is that the implant looks way too sharp especially because if you zoom in a little bit the camera focus isn't always on right here for example it's actually quite blurry and i would want that implant to kind of match the blurriness of wherever the camera is focusing on now the easiest way i found to do this is simply to apply a blur to this layer and use effect mask to control where the blur appears so in the effects and preset panel let's search for the camera lens blur effect let's apply that to our cyberpunk implant bass comp let's zoom in a little bit and that is a little bit too strong now i want a tiny tiny bit of blur all the time so maybe a 0.5 let's collapse this one let's apply another camera lens blur effect to it and this one i'm going to control with masks let's grab the rectangle tool zoom out let's draw a mask around the entire layer but now i'm actually going to draw a another rectangular mask more like a vertical strip which is going to be my area of focus so this mask i'm going to subtract from the big one outside to define where i want this effect this camera lens blur 2 effect to apply so i can kind of define my plane of focus where i want everything to be sharp in the cyberpunk implant based comp let's expand the effects tab and under the camera lens blur 2 effect let's expand that under the compositing options let's press plus twice to add mask 1 and mask 2 as reference masks to this let's come up a little bit mask 1 is set to additive so all of it will get blur but then i'm going to subtract mask 2 from that so let's set that to subtract and you can now see that this mask here this inner mask is now going to define where i want the parts of this implant to be sharp let's just expand the mask and let's give this a little bit of feathering maybe 100 or 150 and so and then animate the mask feather mask pass and maybe even the mask opacity and go through the footage to animate this mask and match up the depth of field and the focus of the face to the areas of this implant that are in focus and that appear sharp and at the end i'm actually going to animate the blur radius of the entire effect because i just want the whole thing to be blurred out let's rewind again and play this back and you can immediately see how much better this implant now sits in the shot that it matches the focus of the camera the next thing i want to do to spice this up is add some sci-fi ui elements over that cyberpunk implant to just give it a bit more life and make it feel a little bit more interactive and interesting because i want to match all of the ui elements for the implant to the movement of the implant itself i'm actually going to come back to my project panel and in here i'm going to duplicate my cyberpunk implant basecomp i'm going to rename this one to cyberpunk implant glowcon let's jump into that and that's really just this little image of our base let's select the cyberpunk implant base png hold down alt or option and select the cyberpunk implant overlays mp4 and drag and drop that right onto the layer to replace it and this is essentially a layer full of ui elements that i've overlaid onto that implant base image let's return to the tobias mirror composition let's duplicate cyberpunk implant bass comp and again let's rename this one to glow comp make sure it's selected hold down alt or option and drag and drop the cyberpunk implant glowcomb that we've just created over it to replace its contents and i'm going to look like zorro a little bit so let's change the mode from multiply over to screen i'm also going to bring the opacity back up to 100 to make sure that is nice and bright also i'm going to add a glow effect and you can either add the standard glow effect that comes with adobe after effects i just like the sapphire glow again from borus fx so i'm going to apply an s underscore glow effect to my cyberpunk implant glow comp let's just bring up the brightness to maybe three or four i'm going to bring down the glow width to maybe around the 50 or so so this is going to add just a little bit of intensity a little bit of glow to some of the highlights on that implant and finally another layer i've prepared if you come back into your project panel you'll find a tobias mirror flare effect let's drag and drop that at the top of the composition and let's again set this one to screen and again i created this lens flare using another effect from the sapphire collection called s underscore lens flare i like this one because it looks really nice and natural but also you can do auto occlusions so you'll see it come in and out as i move my head over it now let's come back to the cyberpunk implant glow comp go into the effects controls make sure you re-enable your motion blur if you've disabled it i'm also going to do the same on the base comp just so that everything is enabled let's collapse all of the layers go back to the beginning let me just make this a little bit bigger and let's play back our final cyberpunk implant effect [Music] and that's all there is to it if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button if you're new here hit that subscribe button and if you want to watch more just click these links over on the right hand side if you want to support me and what i do on this channel be sure to check out all of the links down in the video description and as always thank you very much for watching and until next time i will see you later

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 20,826

Keywords: Cyberpunk, Adobe After Effects Tutorial, Implant, Tutorial, VFX, Visual Effect, PowerMesh, Mesh Tracking, Face Tracking, Boris FX, Sci-Fi, Sci-Fi Effects, How to add a Cyberpunk Implant, How to track a face, Surfaced Studio, Special Effects, Video Editing, UI, HUD, How To, Instructions, 3D Tracking, Mocha Pro, Mocha Pro 2021, Discount, Boris FX Coupon, Effects Collection, Cyberpunk 2077, Face Implant

Id: A1lv3Y7ovis

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021