Mocha + After Effects Tutorial: Tracking Graphics

hi this is Ian for Boris effects and today we're going to use mocha Pro to create this heads-up display VFX composite now before we dive into the project I want to let you know that I've pre-built several different elements just so that we can focus specifically on the tracking aspects of working with mocha Pro now before I start my track I want to draw your attention to the fact that I created a null layer here called blur levels to create a null layer all you do is go up under the layer menu choose new and choose no object now I rename that layer blur levels and I was using it only to add markers into my project here in the timeline now I specifically labeled each of these markers by double clicking on the marker and that opened up the layer marker menu now if you're wondering how did I create the markers you can go ahead and press the asterisk key on a full-size keyboard or you can press ctrl + 8 you just want to make sure that you have the layer selected where you'd like to apply the marker before you go ahead and hit that asterisk key all right so my first marker here says deep blur this is the deepest blurry as part of our video clip if I scrub down the timeline here and hold down shift as I scrub my current time indicator will snap to the other markers so here you can see this is where the tips of her eyelashes come into focus and then right here the base of the eyelashes are most in focus but the iris still isn't in focus so if I scrub down here you can see now the iris is nice and sharp I can see that clearly because of the reflection of the lashes here on the front of the eyeball now if I scrub down you can see it racks back to the lashes and then finally it'll end up back on the tips of those lashes so with all of these elements marked out what I'm really gonna do is scrub through and decide where I want to start my track and I want to start it right where the eyelashes are in focus so I'll go ahead and move my current time indicator to the eyelashes marker here in the middle of the cop at frame 423 then I'll select my video layer go up under effect go down to Boris effects mocha and apply mocha Pro now you'll see the effect controls panel pop up and mocha Pro is applied and you'll notice it's below another effect I have this effect turned off because I'll show you what I did with that a little while later for now I'm gonna drag the mocha Pro effect to the top of the effects stack and then I'll go ahead and click the mocha button this will launch the mocha Pro interface and since my current time indicator was already on that frame that I specified I'm ready to start my tracking now inside of mocha you might make the mistake of thinking you should track something right along the edge of an area for example this pupil I would draw a spline right around the pupil here and that's just not the right way to specify the area to track you should select the pupil and the area around the pupil making sure to include the edges as a part of the area to track and in fact I'm gonna go ahead and go up to my X flying rectangle tool here and I'll create a large rectangle shape just by clicking and dragging and this is going to go ahead and specify this entire eye and this whole area here to be tracked now before I start tracking I want to turn on the grid so let's go up to the top of the interface and show the planar grid this will give me a good preview as to how the grid lines up on the eyes so when I begin the track we can make sure it's not drifting anywhere in the scene now there's one other thing that I want to look at before I start the track and that's my planar surface let's click on the planar surface button and this is going to show me the surface that the track data is actually going to use when I apply that track to other layers and I know it's kind of hard to see but there is a blue cross right here in the middle and when I hover over it I get the move tool so I'll hover over the middle of the planar surface and reposition it right in the middle of the pupil now I can turn my planar surface off because I'm not as concerned about that as I am just making sure this track in general doesn't drift anywhere so I'm gonna start tracking from this point and I'll track all the way to the left to do that I first want to specify what motions I'd like to track and honestly I don't need to worry about the skew or the rotation let's just track the translation and scale I'll click this left track arrow button to track to the left of the current time indicator and that's the tracks I'll go ahead and watch the grid and make sure that it's locked on to the eye and stays in the same position during the entire track now if you were wondering why I chose mocha instead of one of the other trackers inside of After Effects well it's simple it's because mocha Pro uses a planar tracker whereas a typical point track actually locks on to an individual point since this video clip has such variants in focus and different elements becoming sharp and going blurry it's actually a lot easier to track using a planar tracker so that's why I chose mocha Pro because it'll be able to actually analyze this clip even as blurry as it gets and give me a really solid track now once you've finished tracking in one direction or the other it's always wise to hover over your playhead and click and drag and just kind of scrub through the clip to see how well the track actually worked and in this instance I'm very happy with the quality of this track I don't feel like there was much drifting at all if any now I'll go ahead and move my current time indicator right over top of that first frame where we were which is frame 119 now we'll go ahead and track to the right by clicking the right track arrow all right I'm gonna go ahead and hover over my playhead and scrub through here and I definitely like how this looks so I no longer need my planar grid so I'll turn that visibility off and I like my track so I'll double click on layer 1 and I'll just name it track and since I'm done with the tracking I'll go ahead and turn off the COG so it doesn't reprocess if I accidentally click one of the track buttons so I'll go ahead and turn that off and then I'll turn on lock which means that's gonna go ahead and lock all the information off on this layer so that I don't have a chance to accidentally mess something up now I need to determine exactly what parts of the image I would like to matte or mask out so in this example I want to actually be able to map graphics into the iris section of the eye but not the pupil and I need to create a mat that goes right along this hair here so I can add the hair back over top of the graphics after we insert them into this section of the eye so let's start by creating a mat for the eye to do that I'll go up to my X flying tools here and I'll grab the elliptical X blind tool and I'll start in the upper left and click and drag down to the right and I'll hold down shift as I drag and that'll make sure it creates a perfect circle and I'll get something relatively close in size and then let go of my mouse and let go of the shift key now notice I have my splines here and then I have a bounding box around the outside of those splines so there are several different ways that I can adjust this so the first thing I'll do is hover over the middle anchor point on my transform handles and I'll squash this down and then I'll click and drag outside all the points and draw a lasso around them so I can reposition all the points right there on the iris like so now I'll click outside of all those points just to deselect them and move the top one down and this is looking pretty good but I think I need to make it all a little larger so I'll hover over the corner transform handles like so and just make it a little bit larger in those areas now if you need to see things more closely you can hold down the Z key for zoom and then click and drag up to zoom in or drag down to zoom out I'm being a little conservative with this mat so maybe I'll make it come out just a little bit further and I'll move this one point in just like so okay so I'll go ahead and double click on layer two and we'll call this iris now I want to add to the iris by subtracting out the pupil so what I'll do is I'll go back up to the ellipse tool here and I'll click the add ellipse tool okay and now I'll click and drag and I'll hold down shift as I drag just to select the pupil and so now I can go ahead and change the size of that like so and now I think I have a good mask for the pupil unfortunately I didn't make sure that I actually had the iris layer selected when I drew that pupil out so it made a new layer if you accidently make a new layer you can just click the trashcan button to delete it here I'll click on the iris layer one more time I'll go back up with my plus X blind elliptical tool I can go back over here and shift and click and drag and now that's been added inside the other element so here I'll click and drag a lasso around all those points and just make sure to reposition it like so within the pupil itself now I like how this is looking so I want to go ahead and have this move with the track to do that I'll click once on the iris layer and I'll go down here under link to track and I'll change that to link to the track layer so now if we scrub through the timeline here you'll notice the mask is moving along and it appears to be locked down beautifully over the eye now it's not uncommon for people to want to have minor tweaks as they make adjustments so here I'm gonna go ahead and move my current time indicator down to where the iris is most in focus and I can see I'm a little too conservative on this edge so here I'll just hover over the upper left corner of the bounding box and I'll go ahead and make some adjustments to the spline like so now you notice I have another keyframe here in the timeline so I had one all the way at the end and now I have another one here and now that's actually looking pretty darn good and it looks very much like what I want although I'm noticing as we're pulling out here it's getting a little bit large so what I'll do is go ahead and make everything a little smaller like so just at this one point and I'll actually move it all whoops not just the one point I'll select all the points and I'll move it all down and to the left just a little bit so now as I drag here you can see how things are locked on that's looking good here it's kind of drifted a little far to the left so here I'll just position it back to the right a little bit there we go and I'm just being very nitpicky as I do this yeah and I'll go ahead and go all the way back to frame 1 or frame 0 I should say and I'll make this even smaller okay so now when I scrub through you should see I know the model blinks here in this one area and I could worry about that mask but honestly I'm not going to bring the visibility of these graphic elements in AI until a little bit later in the scene so maybe around frame 55 or 56 is where I want to make sure that my mask is actually lining up the way that I wanted to overtop of that section of the eye which right here I think it's looking pretty good so I'm gonna keep that squared away now since my track layer was red I'm gonna make my iris layer yellow by clicking on the box to the left of the iris and I'll go ahead and just choose this yellow color and click OK now there's one other element I want to add a mask for and it's this hair right here so let's scrub our current time indicator until that hair is in focus so it appears to be in focus right around frame 75 ah I was way off right around frame 80 perfect alright so to add another mask this time I'll use my X flying pen tool so I'll go ahead and just click right there it's gonna create an X blind layer using a tool that looks like the pen and I'll start up here just on the top section I'll click once to add an anchor point and I'll click again at another curve point click again here click again there and I want to make sure that I'm adding these points all the way down across the eye like so now in mocha Pro you don't have to have a closed spline you can actually have an open spline and to do that all you have to do is hold down shift and then right click and that will go ahead and make sure that spline stays open so now I want to make sure that spline moves with the track just like I did with the iris layer and the first thing I'll do is go turn the COG off because I don't need any processing happening and I'll select layer four and go down and say link to track link to track track all right so now that that's actually linked I can go ahead and scrub with the current time indicator and I just want to make sure that that spline stays in the middle of that hair as it's going in and out of focus and right there I think it looks pretty good so I don't need to change that shape very much if at all and in fact I'm just looking at this one section here okay this one point I'll go ahead and move it just a little bit there and then I'll come down here I'll just move that just a little bit there perfect alright so this is going to give me a mask right over the hair element so now what I'll do is rename layer four we'll call this hair matte as a matter of fact we should rename iris - iris matte and let's change the color for the hair matte to something like green and I'll click OK alright so now when none of the layers are selected I can see my masks and I can see the other mask that I created here for the hair which is great and now if I scrub through the scene you should notice that everything is locked down and we're pretty much ready to go ahead and take this back into After Effects so since this is functioning as a plugin we don't really need to do too much to actually bring that info in all we need to do is go ahead and save this project like so and then close it and now I can look at all the different elements that I want to go ahead and place into the composition so in the top of my timeline here you'll see this little guy that looks sort of like Ziggy and this is the shy guy button I want you to click on that and that'll reveal all the other graphic elements that we've added into our project now all these elements I'm gonna go ahead and double click so for example I'll turn on the visibility of my first comp here and I'll move my current time indicator to about two seconds so you can see everything that's going on here if I double click my circles pre-cum that'll open the pre comp here and you can see all this is is a bunch of shape layers that have gone ahead and animated clearly I've added a repeater to some of the elements and I animated the rotation and kind of offset those different elements now I'll go back to my I start here and I need to position this graphic into the scene now remember how we started the track on the eyelashes marker here I'm gonna do the same thing as I start to place different elements into the scene so since this is going to be a point of reference I'm gonna go ahead and hold down shift and make sure I'm on the eyelashes marker so once my current time indicator is positioned over the eyelashes marker I'll press shift 1 to add a composition marker and the value of this composition marker is the fact that when I move my current time indicator around any time I press 1 on my keyboard it'll automatically return to that composition marker right there in the middle of the timeline so this is where I want to go ahead and line things up but as you can see my circles have faded out by this point so I need to go ahead and move my current time indicator back a little bit and then position the center of these circles right on the pupil of the eye so I'll select layer 1 and I'll press P to open the position data and I'll click on that pre comp and I'll position it like so right on the center of the eye now I also want to make these circles a little larger so I'm going to press s for the scale and you can see they're up at a hundred and sixty percent scale which is exactly what I want now notice as I scrub the circles aren't moving with the eye I need to go ahead apply the track data to this layer but before I do that I want to actually apply it to a separate layer so if I want to make some adjustments to the position of this element over time I can do so so let me show you what I mean let's go up under the layer menu and go to new solid and for this solid I want it to be 1920 by 1080 and I'll make it bright red and I'll just click OK now I'll go down to my video layer layer 8 and under mocha at the bottom I have tracking data here and first thing I want to do is create my track data and I want to use the track for the track data so I'll turn off the COG for the hair mat and I'll turn on the COG for the track and I'll click OK now if I select layer 8 and press the U key you can see I've got a lot of different keyframes that have been created for this track now instead of trying to copy and paste these keyframes I can go ahead and go down here to the export options so I want to export the transform properties and I want to export them to the red solid layer I just created so I'll click apply export and now you can see that red solid layer is positioned in the scene so let me go back up in my timeline here and select my red solid and I'll press T to open the opacity and I'll scrub the opacity down and you'll notice the center point of that solid is in the middle of the pupil and the reason for that is when I placed the planar surface in the middle of the pupil it lined that up the center of the planar surface is where the center of that track data is so now as I scrub through you can see the red rectangle solid that I created is locked in with the eye so let me go ahead and make sure I've got my circles selected so I can make sure that the circles are centered on the pupil right there on frame 320 - so now what I'm going to do is have the circles follow the red solid so to do that I'll go to the parent and link column if this column isn't open you can right-click next to the layer name and go to columns and choose parent and Link so here I'm going to go ahead and click on this pick whip for circles pre and I'll point it at the red solid so now as I scrub through in the scene you'll notice those elements are moving along with I quite nicely which is exactly what I want so I'll turn the visibility of red solid off and I'll scrub through so you can see now we've successfully created our first graphic reveal where these graphic elements appear out of the middle of the blurry eye now as the camera keeps moving these elements are going to have to kind of change blurs etc and I'll get to that in a moment but for right now let's work on linking up the track data with all the different graphic elements I'm gonna turn off the visibility for my circles Prix and I'll select layer three here my screen - pre KUB and i'll turn its visibility on now to see this I'm gonna press T to open up the opacity and you can see it's set at 75 percent now I'm gonna scrub through here and see if I can see those different elements and even though I can't I'll toggle my switches and modes here and you notice I have different blend modes for each of these layers now this blend mode I chose worked really well based on the effects I've applied to this layer but for right now I'll select layer 3 and I'll shift click and make sure all of these different elements are selected or different layers are selected and I'm just gonna change all their blend modes back to normal so we can actually see those graphic elements so here with the screen to pre comp selected now when I scrub through you can see I've got a whole different series of animations and what I'm gonna do for this one is move my current time indicator to about frame 5 12 that's where this line is pointed towards the pupil and the iris and this is going to be the frame that I'll use to link up my tracking so to do that all I need to do is grab the pic lip and point it at the red solid like so and now when I scrub through you can see these elements are tied to the eye and it's moving accordingly so that's great let's go ahead and turn that visibility off and I want to select the visibility for layer 4 this is my eye fill if I double click on that comp you can see what I've created here these are rotating different elements that I created inside of and it's not refreshing now there we go these are rotating elements that I created inside of Illustrator and the visibility of each of the different layers are just turning off and on which i think is kind of cool so I'm going to go back to my I start here and I need to position this in the scene so I'm going to press 1 to move my current time indicator back to this comp marker and then with my eye filled pre comp selected I'll reposition this in the scene like so right over top of the eye and I need to adjust the scale of this so I'll select that fill and I'll press s to open up the scale and I'll scrub on that parameter and I'll scrub it down to a value right around 50 and this looks pretty good for what I'm looking for now I need to link this up with my track data just like all the other ones instead of using the pick whip this time I'll just click on the drop down and choose the red solid now when I scrub through you can see those different elements are appearing in the different parts of the eye so that's kind of cool but as I scrub I want you to notice some of these elements are appearing outside of the iris so we'll get there and fix that in just a minute I'll press one on my keyboard to move my playhead back to that marker turn the visibility and my eye fills off and I'll turn my eye lines on now to speed things up I'll repeat the same process that we've done before scaling positioning and linking back to the Milka track for my subsequent graphic layers so this is great all these lines are animating on I I've got the different fills animating on the eye that looks kind of cool right but it's not really refined and it's not refined because I don't have my mattes applied so a matte is a black-and-white representation of transparency and I can get that based on the mocha Pro data so I'll select layer 8 and I'll press command D to duplicate that layer and the reason I duplicated this is because I'm going to use this layer as a matte so I don't need this film effect applied to that layer so I'll click on the film effect in my effect controls panel and just press delete and then here under my matte section for mocha I want to go ahead and view the matte and it's gonna take a second to turn on but it's saying all visible layers well let's see what visible layers are I'll click on the visible layers button and sure enough the track matte is on I don't need that and the hair matte is on I don't need that I just need the iris matte so I'll go ahead and turn those on and now you can see I've got the iris here and like I said a matte is a black-and-white representation of transparency so whatever's white is going to allow the graphic through and whatever's black is going to get knocked out so I'll position this element right above my eye lines little comp here and I'll go to my track mat area if you're not seeing track mats what you need to do is toggle your switches and modes button right here so you can see the different modes so I want my eye lines layer layer seven to look at the layer above and use the luminance for that mat to determine its transparency now to speed things up I'll duplicate this process again and mask out the other elements for the eye so now everything is actually masked out if I go ahead and scrub through here you can see those graphic elements appear inside the eye but they're not appearing anywhere outside of the iris now if I want to soften up the edges of the mat I can do so inside of the mocha Pro effect so here I'm gonna go ahead and select my eye Phil's comp right here and I'll toggle the visibility off and on and you can see here on the edge it's kind of sharp so what I'll do is I'll go here and select layer four and I'll go to the mat section and I'll just increase the feather value like so and that's gonna soften the edge of that mat so I don't want it to be super soft I just want it to be a little soft so here I'll set it to a value around 15 and that's just gonna soften up that edge just a little bit and to speed things up again I'll feather the mask for the other mask layers and now we get a little bit of a softer transition between the different elements now that we've tied all of the tracking data to the different elements in the scene what we can work on doing now is actually stylizing the elements and then stylizing the footage etc etc so actually we should start by stylizing the footage I'm gonna go down to my bottom layer here which is layer 11 and I'll just collapse the layer so you can see that it's selected and for this layer I'll turn on the s film effect which is the sapphire film effect so I'll turn the visibility on and boom you can see I've already got this really cool effect let me open up the sapphire film effects options here and I want to show you the fact that you can actually load presets if I go ahead and click the load preset button it's going to take a second to open the preset browser but in here I've got a whole host of different presets I can use as starting points all I need to do is just click one of the presets and choose load and it'll be applied now I'm gonna click cancel because I like the style that I went ahead and created here now just as an aside if you ever want to know what parameters have been changed within an effect or something on a layer that you've changed all you need to do is select that layer and press the u key twice rapidly uu and that will show you any of the parameters that you've changed from their default settings so you notice here within here let me make my timeline a little larger so you notice here within the film effect the sapphire film effect I adjusted the red green of blue settings for the print light settings i offset the darks I changed the glow width I changed the grain amplitude I didn't want to add any grain so I set that to zero I added a little bit of a vignette and a little bit of a blur mask so it's a little blurry around the edges so this effect is really kind of deep the other nice thing about it is the fact that you can actually choose the negative film and the print film so you can really stylize the look but the reason I went ahead and applied this style was so now when I go ahead and start applying the style to the different line elements I can see how everything blends together now I'll select my eye fills layer go up to my effect controls and I'll turn on my boris continuum effect of LED and you notice that's created kind of an interesting look here I'll zoom into the comp by pressing the period key to zoom in and you can see it's giving these nice little LED looking textures into those elements I also added another continuum fast lens blur to just soften up that look a little bit let's look at the lines I'll select layer seven here I started with a tint where I mapped white to a slight green color and that gave a green color to those lines and then I added my continuum glow alpha edges which really help that pop and then I added the Lens Blur on top of that just to soften that a little bit so I did the same thing down here with this one tint alpha edges and fast blur so here now you can really see what this actually looks like in the scene let's go back here to my screen to pre-comp and turn its visibility on and you'll notice if i zoom out I can resize this panel to fit to the composition by pressing shift /alright to stylize these I use several different effects you can see I used the Sapphire rack D focus which kind of give it a neat little soft look I added the boris continuum prism effect which gave a neat little separation between the red green a blue and then I added a sapphire glow on top of that now in addition to these options I went ahead and changed the blend modes for those layers now well go back to my screen to pre-comp and click on the drop down and for this I actually liked classic color dodge which really heightened the interaction between the blurred effects and the background video let's select my eye fills here and for the fills I set that blend mode to vivid light which just made things melt into the eye a little more clearly now let me go back here to my eye lines at the bottom this eyelines I set to screen and that's going to just create a slightly additive effect in here I'll click on my eye lines and my last eye lines I set to classic color dodge and so now those elements are really blended into the scene but there is one problem you'll notice that hair isn't over top of the graphic unfortunately the graphic is over top of the hair so what I'm gonna do is go down to my video layer here and I'll press command D to duplicate that layer okay and with that layer duplicated I'll go ahead and position that to the top of the layer stack above all the other graphic elements like so now I only want just that one mask applied so what I'm gonna do is go up here under my mocha Pro and I'll go to the mattes and unfortunately I can't really get a matte off of a single spline but what I can do is create an AE mask based on that spline so what I'm gonna do is go up here and I'll go to visible layers and I want just the hair matte visible so I'll turn off the other two layers and I'll turn that off and then down here I'll make sure my shape is going to be all visible and then here I'll say create AE masks and when I do that I can now select layer 3 and press M and you can see my hair mask is actually in the scene so in order to have an effect stroke that specific area I'm gonna go up under the effect menu and I'll go to generate and I'll choose stroke so the stroke is going to look at the hair mat which is the mask that's been applied now I need to increase the size of the brush to match the distortion on the hair so here I'll go ahead and increase the size of the brush like so and that looks pretty good I can bring the hardness of the brush down because it is supposed to be soft so you know it should be really low like 35 or less now let's do 17 okay so that's really soft and I'll make the brush size even larger and what I need to do is actually keyframe this as the hair blurs so I'll go ahead and add a keyframe here for brush size and I'll just move down the timeline just a little bit like so and with all these effects and everything it's gonna take a second to refresh what's going on in the scene so to speed things up what I'll do is solo this one layer and I'll yep just solo that one layer that's perfect so here if we scrub let's scrub through the scene okay right there it's a little more narrow so I'll go ahead and make that brush size smaller there we go cool and with this layer selected I'm going to press the U key not once but twice and that will show me that I've got my mocha Pro which I don't necessarily need to see so I'll collapse that here's my stroke width so you can see I've got two keyframes for this now this is when it pays to actually look at the layer that I created earlier my blur levels layer so I'll go ahead and move my blur levels layer up just above my hair mat so what I'll do is add keyframes that will match these markers so here I'll hold down shift as I scrub and there I'm on the tips section so I'll change the brush size of that to be a little more narrow there we go okay it could be a little larger here for this one section there we go the iris you know what I'll just move this keyframe right here over the iris and I'll make that just a little wider there we go lashes since we had this blur level before I'll just copy and paste there we go and then let's go back here all the way to the beginning to the deep blur and that's when this should be super fat so I'll go ahead and just make that nice and fat like so perfect now let's go ahead and look at the stroke effect I want the stroke effect to not be on the original image but to reveal the original image so it's really only creating just this section here so when I turn the visibility of this solo off so we can actually see how this looks in the composite you can see it's blended over top of the other layer and it should be seamless if I go ahead and move this down to the tip section here you'll notice once everything refresh is that now the hair is nice and sharp right over top of our graphic and it's actually over top of the graphic so thanks to the fact that I could use MOCA pros ability to actually create an open path I could use that to create an AE mask which I then added the stroke to and was able to add this over top so I'll select layer 4 and I'll press return and I'll just call this hair over so the only thing we have left to do is just enable our circles pre comp right here and within the circles pre comp if I press the U key you'll notice I have the rack D focus effect that's applied and I'll just turn that on and what that's going to do is actually create the D focus of those circles so in this area they're going to start nice and sharp you'll notice the D focus width is set to 0 here but it's keyframed so as we move further down the timeline it's going to get wider and wider with the D focus width so eventually they just kind of blur out of the scene because it gets really really wide here you can still see them it's just a little bit of an adjustment here there we go so see you can see at 28 they're still there and they're blurry and they just blur right out so it looks like the cameras kind of moving through those effects and then right here I have it actually fade out and disappear towards the end of that section so now that we're finished I'll cue up the finish animation so we can check out exactly what it is we built all of this projects tracking and masking is made possible with mocha Pro and assisted with some of the great filters from Boras effects sapphire in continuum plug-in packages thanks for watching and make sure to follow Boris effects on LinkedIn Facebook YouTube Twitter and Instagram to stay up to date with the latest information and training materials for mocha Pro continuum sapphire FX and all the Boris effects products

Channel: Boris FX Learn

Views: 22,426

Keywords: Mocha Pro, boris fx, red giant, kingpin, motion tracking, planar tracking, hud, graphics, ironman, After Effects, open spline, mograph, tutorial, AE, Mocha AE, masking, video copilot, andrew kramer

Id: x0P8DPNWmdo

Length: 42min 59sec (2579 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019