- Mocha Pro 2021 introduces PowerMesh, a major update to Mocha's famous planar tracking technology. PowerMesh is designed to deliver a fast and accurate workflow for tracking organic and warped surfaces. And even better, PowerMesh can now be used to assist visual effects compositing, drive rotoscoping, and can be exported to a
variety of host applications for finishing, effects,
and motion graphics. So let's get started with
the PowerMesh basics. PowerMesh can now track both rigid and non-rigid warped surfaces that were previously impossible to track with the Mocha default tracker. First, we will create a tracking mesh. Just like all Mocha tasks, we start by using the spline tools. So, I will use the X-spline tool to draw a layer around
the area we want to track. Then, depending on the object motion, I will choose the appropriate
planar tracking parameters: translation, rotation, scale, shear, and/or perspective. Note that PowerMesh is a
sub-planar tracking process that is applied on top of
the Mocha planar tracking in one pass. Because of this unique process, you will find PowerMesh
solves to be quite fast compared to other optical
flow based applications. Enable PowerMesh by
clicking the mesh button and an initial mesh is
automatically generated. Now we can refine the mesh generation and tracking options. Mesh generation mode contains two options, automatic and uniform. Automatic will determine
the best mesh placement based on the pixels
contained within the layer. Automatic is best paired
with adaptive contrast to get the most detail. Uniform will generate
a uniformly spaced mesh instead of using the image information. This uniform option can be very useful on skin or areas that do
not have much texture. Mesh size is the distance between vertices measured in pixels. This means that the smaller the mesh size, the more potential mesh
segments you will have. The larger the mesh size, the larger the segments and the less faces you will have. We recommend a starting mesh size of 32 when working in HD or 4K, and larger for higher resolution projects. The vertices on spline option will extend the mesh generation to the boundaries of the spline, rather than just over the
pixel details within it. This is my preferred workflow
because I like having the boundary to define a cleaner mesh, but it is not always necessary. For uniform meshes, this option makes sure at least part of the mesh
is overlapping the spline. For low detail surfaces, adaptive contrast boosts details in the underlying image
to help the automatic mesh generate the most useful vertices. Use this option with
care because sometimes you don't want too much mesh detail, and this can potentially
cause tracking artifacts. Click the generate mesh button to update the mesh based on the settings. If you want to remove the mesh completely, select clear mesh. Now let's track forwards. Again, we do want to pay attention to the object's motion and choose the best underlying planar track option for the general motion. So perspective tracking will
give us the best results. In fact, you can see that if
we enable our surface tool, that we have tracked
the flat planar surface and the mesh sub-surface
data at the same time. And just like the standard Mocha workflow, we can use subtraction layers
to help the mesh tracker chew through difficult occlusions. For example, here in this shot, I would add a second layer for my hands and move the mesh tracker below it to avoid the foreground occlusions. Once a track is done,
we can edit the mesh. In our viewer controls, this new icon lets us view the mesh and also allows us to switch between mesh and points view. This is quite useful as
Mocha is now capturing a dense field of tracking data. The show only point section here can help you focus on the data and analyze mesh tracking accuracy. To make adjustments, you can enable the edit track mesh
button in the top toolbar. When selected, you can add, delete, and edit the mesh intersections. Shift click to select
multiple mesh vertices, or use the lasso pick tool found here. You can remove a selected mesh vertex with the delete key and
use the add vertex tool found here to add new joint
segments to your mesh. Mesh tracking can be keyframed independently of the planar track. You can enable the zoom windows to help refine your keyframes. To dive a little deeper into
the mesh tracking options, let's look here. Smoothness, also referred to as rigidity, determines the amount of smoothness to apply to the mesh when tracking. Think of this as how much influence Mocha's planar track
has over the PowerMesh. A high smoothest setting is like applying starch to your mesh. It will follow the flat
planar track more rigidly and will not distort as much. A lower smoothness will follow
the sub-surface movement more directly and distort the mesh more. In short, you will get
more sub-planar warped data with a lower smoothness. Auto smoothness tells
Mocha to guess the amount of smoothness to apply to the mesh track. Use this if you are unsure. Once our page is tracked, we can warp this data
back onto the newspaper, using the plug-in interface. To do that, we first go
to the stabilize module and use the mesh stabilize option. Additionally, we can select which frame is the target alignment frame. In other words, if I select
a specific frame of my shot, then this is the frame that I will align my graphics to in my composite. I can do this using
the align surface tool. Then we select the
highest quality rendering from the dropdown menu and save and close Mocha. Now that I'm back in After Effects, I can apply my graphics. Here I have quickly photoshopped a graphic onto the paper, which I
have already positioned to the newspaper on the first frame. Now I will paste the Mocha effect to apply the tracked mesh warp to
this new graphic layer. In the AE Mocha plugin interface, we select the render checkbox, select the stabilize warp option, and we make sure we apply the mat data to isolate our warp effect to our pages. So here is our before and here is our result with a little hand and shadow
roto to sell the effect. Now let's talk about
PowerMesh-driven rotoscoping. Mocha's PowerMesh
tracking can also be used to drive spline warping
for advanced masking. Now roto splines will
stick to organic objects with even less manual keyframe work. For roto, enable the warp spline option when mesh tracking. Now both planar tracking
and mesh warping distortion is applied to the spline itself. Once a track is complete, simply make a keyframing pass to correct the shape edges over time. And of course, Mocha's
magnetic edge snapping helps save time here. Hold Alt and S to snap, or hold the S key and drag to enable edge snapping. Masking humans, animals, and
non-rigid organic objects can be one of the most
time-consuming tasks in all of post-production. We are very excited to see how users will take advantage of the new PowerMesh-driven roto workflow. PowerMesh-driven tracking and shaped data can be exported to many host applications for a wide variety of workflows. For roto delivery, you can
always render mats to file, which is found here as
export rendered shapes. Or you can choose export shape to export or copy and paste roto data
into host applications, including After Effects, Premiere, Nuke, Flame, Fusion, and more. When using Mocha Pro as a plugin, you can simply exit the
interface and select apply mask to render your selected layers back to your timeline. The Mocha Pro plugin for After Effects adds the create mask button to convert the Mocha layers
into native AE masks. And you can also use PowerMesh
in a stabilized workflow. PowerMesh tracking can
be used in multiple ways. One thing I am quite excited about is the ability to render
a stabilized output driven by PowerMesh for
advanced effects work. After mesh tracking, go
to the stabilize module and enable mesh warp to create
an inverse stabilization. If you would like to view or export the warp stabilize patch, enable use mat, and you
can preview the output. Then we can exit the plugin and tick render in stabilize. Now we have a stabilized
inverse warped patch for paint fixes, beauty
work and graphic inserts. Mocha users will
appreciate this new ability to paint and work on a flattened surface. And the original motion
is easily propagated back to the shot simply
by reversing the effect. In this example, I will stabilize the object's original motion, then I will pre-comp it, and replace my logo with paint work or added graphics. And to reverse the stabilization, we simply copy and paste the Mocha effect and invert the motion to get back to our original clip. This amazing workflow can
be done inside many hosts, including After Effects,
Nuke, Flame, and more. And lastly, let's talk
dense PowerMesh exports. Beyond the render options you can also export
PowerMesh dense tracking data to multiple host applications, including After Effects nodes and our new Alembic 3D exporter. Here we've used PowerMesh
to track these hands and then convert the data to AE nodes. With a little magic
using the Plexus plugin, we've quickly created
this motion graphics look using more tracked data
than a typical Mocha project and without having to
use multiple surfaces. I hope you're as excited
about PowerMesh as I am. Check out our new tutorials
on Mocha Pro 2020's new features to explore other workloads like Alembic exports, Python scripting, and AdjustTrack 2.0. To learn more about new features
found in Mocha Pro 2021, or to download a free trial, visit us at www.borisfx.com. Find free tutorials, live training events, user forums, and much more.
