Age effect in After Effects and Mocha Pro 2021 (Power Mesh Tutorial)

[Music] hey hello and welcome to this really fun tutorial by flowmotion because today i'm going to show you how you can get pretty old pretty fast so just follow me into after effects so in here as always let's build this one from scratch but first things first as always if you have a question about this tutorial or about the workflow about moca pro about visual effects in general about my equipment and whatnot then just feel free and leave me a comment down below and i promise i will answer all of your questions so now let's have a look on what we're going to create today so this tutorial will basically cover mesh tracking maybe you're wondering what is mesh tracking and why haven't i heard of that before well that's a new feature within the new version of mocha pro and this is a complete game changer so if you watch this tutorial and think that you need to have mocha pro within your visual effects box and you want to purchase it then you will also get a discount if you use my promotion code flowmotion15 to get 15 off and i will also write that down in the description below and i'm also going to share the link to mocha pro over there but hey let's jump directly into this tutorial so what do we have here this is the footage that i have shot and now let's just define a frame where everything should start so this will be our reference frame and i think i go to this mark that was about the timing that i also had in my video so i can set a marker here and i'm just dragging that out here and i can double click on it and name it and i'm just calling this reference so now let's define the area that we want to track maybe i'm not tracking everything because that just takes a little bit of time maybe just a few seconds maybe until here and i hit n for end and for the first frame i hit b for beginning and now i'm simply just trimming the comp to the work area because this is the part that i want to work on so next thing to keep it a little bit more organized i go to composition settings and set the start frame to zero and hit okay in that way we are starting at frame zero and i'm also going to pre-compose this footage and call it the track and we don't have any effects or anything applied to it but anyways i'm going to move all attributes into the new composition because in that way it will adjust the composition duration to the time span of the selected layers and this is what i want now the composition is exactly from beginning to end and full frame perfect so what are the steps that we need to do at first we will jump into mocha pro and i show you the new features of this awesome power mesh tool the mesh tracker and after that i'm going to show you how you can apply different things to your face or basically everything that you're tracking because the mesh tracker as it says it is there to not only track planar surfaces as we were used to within mocha but it can track warped surfaces and after that i'm going to show you how to create a old face and you will learn a really cool new technique that's also a new feature within the adobe creative cloud and i'm also going to show you some really cool quick tips on rotoing fine details so stay tuned for that but let's jump into mocha and for that let me bring out mocha pro just drag it onto the footage and click on the mocha button so here in moca everything looks like in the old versions of mocha and also the workflow is the same so let's just start with our normal workflow by creating a spline around the area that we want to track and in my case this is the head and the neck and now we can define what we want to track as we are used to translation scale rotation and shear has always been there always fine perspective why not in this case because i'm moving my head a little bit and now there's the new feature the mesh so we can also track a mesh and when we click on that you can see that it automatically creates a mesh for us which is pretty nice but i want to have finer controls i want to define how dense the mesh really is that we are tracking and we can do that pretty easy because over here we have all the mesh options and instead of the automatic mesh that we just saw let's just switch to the uniform one and we don't see anything because every time we make a change here we have to update it by clicking on generate mesh and now you can directly see what this is doing it creates a mesh and later on it will track all of those points and therefore warp the mesh in the same way like the face so that we can later on apply cool effects to it and there's really nothing more to it that i'm going to do here you could click on the adapt contrast button so it will basically add more contrast to the image before tracking so it finds more detail and you could also do the auto smoothness but hey let's just leave it with the defaults everything we have done here is we switched it from automatic mesh to uniform mesh and of course we enabled the mesh and by the way i'm hitting x to get the hand tool here and that is for zooming in and out okay let's just start the tracking with all those default values and while this is tracking let me tell you that this is actually real time so all this great power of mocha that we are used to from other tracks the planar tracks as well as the roto is in mocha pro in the mesh tracker so it's super super fast and also super intuitive to work with and you can of course benefit from all the other options that you're used to like occlusion mats if you have more complex shots or if my hand for example would reach over my face i could also track my hand and in the same time remove the data from my hand from the other track pretty amazing and remember you can not only track and stabilize with this but you can also use it for complex roto stuff and as you see as the mesh is tracking and not only the spline that you have created that will basically mean that the roto is more accurate or in other words you'll need less keyframes or less refinement so super super powerful and while i was talking the track already finished so you can see what this is doing and from a first view this looks pretty cool and super interesting i'm thinking about a hundred thousand different ideas that come to my mind what you can do with all of that but of course i want to show you how to get old so the same workflow as with a planar track you go to the frame where you set your reference frame and where the whole grid is still aligned to the face and in my case this is the first frame and then you can click on show the planar surface and at the moment this is that blue box here but i want to have it full frame so i'm simply clicking on that button that's exactly for that reason expand the planar surface of selected layers to fill the entire frame when i click on it it's now filling the entire frame exactly what i want i can save this now and we are done in mocha and i can close it now so now this was our tracking but i've already prepared some examples for you so i'm just copying those over so what i have here i created a grid and i can turn it on and off this is just a grid effect on a layer i have set the color to red and then masked out the face really quickly and this is exactly the same that we are going to do later on we create a mask that we can lay on top of my face and now how do we apply the tracking data that is super easy we have tracked on our track layer and i can simply go to mocha and copy it edit copy and because i want the same data to be on the mesh track and here i go to edit paste and when we scrub through this now you see that nothing is happening because we have to tell the layer how it should behave because all the warp data that we have created we want to see that in the render so we have to activate it so for the module renders we check the checkbox for the render and in this way it will render the image with the data that we have created so enable it and now we have to define what exactly do we want to render in the module you can find all the different things that you can do but we want to render the warped image so there's the warped image and remember the first frame is the same because we have aligned everything on the first frame this is why we don't see it here but when i play this back you see that everything warps like it is supposed to do so each of those squares has different tracking data so to say and just as a quick comparison to that i've also created something in advance and this is the same grid but this time i have applied corner pin data like you would do with a normal track and now look what this is doing you see that all the squares stay the same because they don't get warped you can really see that this would be like a mask that you print out on paper and hold in front of your face and then it would track with your face but of course it would still look like a pretty flat mask and this is why in previous tutorials what i did is did several tracks for different parts of the head like chin cheek nose forehead eyes and so on and then with all that combination you could fake something that looks real but of course we want to have this result but before we are going to create the old face let me just quickly show you what i have prepared here and we are going to reproduce all of that in just a minute but this is just to show you what we are going to do so again this is the first frame and this is really just like a cut out and i can play this back maybe just with the mask so you see what this is doing and when you take a look at the cheeks or on the chin or the nose or basically all the parts are warping differently so that this almost looks like like yeah almost like a 3d mask and in combination with my face that's what this will look like okay but now let's simply delete those three layers because we want to create this on our own so at first we need our reference frame and therefore we go to the reference and we can save this frame you can do that by composition and go to save frame as file and now you can click on what you want to save i don't want a photoshop sequence here i want a jpeg and then you can define where you want to save it and i've already done that as you can see here as a reference frame for the sake of it let's call this reference frame 2 save it and don't forget to click the render button okay and now let's start with the magic and basically there are three ways that you can do that first way would be to search on the internet for pictures of old people and then just make small patches and try to find your way through after effects or photoshop and make yourself look old and i think there are also apps out there that can do that pretty good these days the second thing that i was also thinking about is to film this and then simply have my father or grandfather standing at the same position filming him or take a photo of him and so i have patches of someone who looks like me in an older version and then i could recreate that and then i saw the new pretty amazing features within photoshop so let's quickly jump into photoshop and in here i have the reference frame but i also created this frame here and this is just for you to see it a bit better because this is like more of a neutral pose that i have here because in the new version of photoshop you can go to filters and there you have neural filters and basically those are filters that artificial intelligence will create for us so it looks for features in the face or in the picture and can change that and that machine is called adobe sensei so you will hear that in the future i think pretty often and you have already some filters over here but there are also some filters when you click on the beta filters and you have the beta filters also in your normal version so this is not a beta version that i'm using this is just normal photoshop version and you see that there are hell a lot of filters in there but i'm going to concentrate on the smart portrait and click on enable already you see that we have some sliders for happiness surprise anger and of course the facial age that we want to change here but let's quickly try it with happiness just to see what will happen okay you see this funny result and it also tried to guess my teeth here because as you have seen there were no teeth on my image but maybe let's just try the other way less happiness oh okay and you see what you're getting here and what i found when turning yourself old you can not only use the facial age what i'm doing now and i'm just dragging that to like 31 so that i get some wrinkles but you could also play with happiness surprise and anger because in that way it will distort your face and will therefore create more wrinkles and yeah this is what i've done here i just looked for the image and for my file i actually created like i think it was four or five different images and then brought them together in after effects and also what i did not like was the hair but you could also play with that with the hair thickness and this is really cool if you bring it down you get like more skin on your head and in that way you can also create more wrinkles on your forehead so really cool but i still don't like the hair but the face is fine and we are going to work on the hair later and for the output you can also check that you want to have it on a new layer so i'm quickly doing that on the original frame here go to filter neural filters smart filters facial age high hair thickness down and this really looks super cool so i'm going to take this one and also save it again i'm using a jpeg here i've already saved an old face here so call this old phase 2 and click save ok and we are done so in here here's my old face that i have created and i just bring this out here and pre-compose it and i'm going to call this the insert and i'm just going to show you how i did the hair in a minute so stick with me and let's directly apply the tracking once again just copy the tracking data and paste it with ctrl c and ctrl v and then apply the render so that you see the rendered version of this and of course the warped rendered version now again it is warping the whole image so i'm going to create a mask here now creating the mask and i want to blend my neck so i'm not cutting this out really perfect and around the hair i'm doing this just pretty rough because i know that i'm going to create new hair anyways and now i'm also going to mask out my eyes as well as my mouth of course i have to subtract that so by hitting m i get all the masks and the eyes and mouth i want to subtract by hitting f i get feathering options and i'm just feathering this a little bit and back on my footage this is what we have now and this is what this looks like already looking pretty good now let's feather the edges a little bit into my real skin and therefore i'm hitting g again so the first time i click it i get the pen tool and the second time i get this feather to feather the mask and how this works you click on the mask that creates a point and you can drag that out for feathering and you see i'm going to feather this a lot around the head and then i add extra points and bring this back around the head you can also click on the layer again and bring it inwards so it feathers all of this a little bit to the inside best thing is really to play with it until you have a mask that fits perfect on your face and honestly i am super happy with what i'm seeing here this is so awesome this is unbelievable okay last thing let's work on the hair and what i found for my example is that my hair is fine it just needs to have a different color so let's go back to the insert and i'm grabbing the reference frame again because here i want to mask out only the hair and i tried that with a simple mask and quickly came to the conclusion that it's just too much work for all this detail here so what i did is i took the reference frame brought it into a new composition maybe we call this hair and basically it's only going to be one frame long so i make the composition only one frame long because remember it's just one still frame that we have to work on and this is so powerful even if you want to make a zombie or add a wound or something to the face hey you just have to take your time for one really cool frame and then it applies to all the rest i want to roto this out and then i remembered a video that i did a few weeks back new features within after effects and there's a tool called roto brush that is exactly there challenging stuff like this or actually not actually it's just to make a quick roto but hey why not think outside the box and use it exactly for that shot i'm going to show you how you have the roto brush tool here and when you click on it you see that nothing is happening because you can't roto on the composition you have to roto on the layer and for that you simply double click on it and you already have this green brush icon and i can quickly brush over the hair and it will create a matte for me and by hitting down alt you can subtract stuff from it and now i'm just going through this real quick and hey all of this is real time so i'm trying to get the best result that i can and of course you see that there's still all this fine hair detail and i'm working on that now because there's not only the roto brush up here but also the refine edge tool when i click on that i'm doing exactly that what you would expect i'm painting over the edges that i want to refine so i'm telling after effects and once again this is after effects sensei i'm telling those great machine which parts are also part of my mat or part of the edge that makes up the mat and i'm also doing this inside here when i let go you see it creates a black and white mask for the hair super cool and i can also click on those icons here to see different versions so this is the mask that i have created now for the hair and hey for me that is super perfect and super fine but remember this is an effect so you could still go into the rotor brush mat and refine the mat like feather it add more contrast shift the edges and what not and you can do the same for the fine-tuned refine edge mat you also have options to work on that like feathering that a little bit and so much stuff to play with okay once you're happy with the result you have to freeze it that basically means everything that you have created will get stored within that frame in that effect so as we only have one frame this should go pretty fast i click on freeze and there we are and now i can go back to the composition and you see here's only my hair so i can close this now and go back to the insert because remember i only did that to change the color of the hair so let's bring out the hair in here and now i'm simply going to time freeze frame so that i have it for the whole composition and i could work directly on the hair like for example tint it but what i prefer to do is to create a new adjustment layer right in alt y or simply go to layer new adjustment layer and bring that beneath the hair and use the hair as a matte for the alpha and in that way when i'm doing something to the adjustment layer it only takes place where the hair sits on top and for example i can do the same and i'm using the hair again to cut out the reference frame so we only see the parts that we are working on so we have the old face with some gray hair and in our footage this is what this looks like so almost there i'm quickly going to change the color on that side of my neck a little bit to blend a little bit better and for that simply creating a new adjustment layer put it on top of everything here and mask out that part bring up a levels effect and now i'm going to the footage and enable the lock here and in that way i can go to the insert layer but i can still see what happens to the whole composition because in that way i can now work on this until the skin tones match now this part is really looking nice so i can unlock this and now the rest is simply again feathering this so and that made a big difference once again i'm hitting the lock to show you this is width and without the levels effect okay and now is the last step of course you have seen that there's some old hair showing through through my gray hair but nothing easier than that because for that i simply created a clean plate and when i bring that out here i can simply mask out the part where my hair sits and then i'm just feathering this a lot so maybe as a last step because i see that my lip is looking a little bit strange over there but i can easily fix that by going in here and simply make this a bit bigger and maybe even also feather this a little bit more maybe some overall color correction and let's keep it simple with this one just bringing out a curves effect and just clicking on dark mid and highlights and just create a small s curve and this is just to have a little bit more contrast on the image and maybe also add a photo filter and make this a little bit cooler maybe that's too much something like this looks fine and here we have our final shot so i really hope that you also like the new mesh tracking features as much as i do and once again if you're considering buying mocha pro then you will get 15 off by using my promotion code flowmotion15 and also remember the mesh tracker is just one of the many many awesome features that are only available in mocha pro so this is really really a great tool and if you also like all the other quick tips and workflow tips and insights on my workflow feel free to give me a thumbs up leave me a comment and as promised i will answer all of your comments and you can also consider subscribing because the more subscribers i have the more tutorials i can do for you and i really really love doing those so what tutorials do you want to see next just leave me suggestions also in the comments below and for now i wish you a lot of fun getting old in after effects [Music] you

Channel: flomotion

Views: 251,946

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, power mesh, mocha pro, mesh tracker, mesh tracking, warp tracker, warped surfaces, mesh, photoshop, photoshop 2021, new features, neural filter, neural filters, age, digital makeup, aging, planar tracker, facial age, getting old, morph, morphing, roto brush, after effects 2021, adobe sensei, meshtracker, corner pin, stabilize, roto, greenscreen, motion tracking, promotion, grey hair, wrinkles, time travel, young, old, grandpa, power, warp

Id: CT-qI83rbGU

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020