Power Mesh in Mocha Pro for After Effects

hello everyone this is evan abrams and in this video i'd like to share an amazing new tool with you this is power mesh a new feature of mocha pro mesh tracking allows us to place graphics organically onto deforming surfaces i'm talking faces i'm talking fabric all the surfaces that are hard to stick to and reliably track anything that bends flexes and warps we can stick things on it so it appears so natural so organic so seamless you'd be forgiven for thinking it's magic so let's power it up and see if this will mesh with your workflow so mesh warping allows us to easily stick objects on uneven surfaces stuff like this t-shirt perhaps so let's say we're going to insert something on here uh probably like the d-a-n-c-e music video from 2011 and you know justice fans correct me in the comments but with this clip selected we're going to add the mocha pro effect on here so grab that from your effects and presets drop it on here then we can launch the mocha interface from inside the effect and this is where the magic happens we start by making a spline on the area that we want things to stick so we just grab the x spline tool click around and then right click to close the path wonderful now before we track i just want to make sure that this area won't get intersected by anything strange like a hand or areas of strong shadow because the mesh is going to be based on texture so anything that disrupts or obscures that texture we want to remove that from the calculation we can do that by putting splines over those nasty obscuring hands i'm just going to manual those in some rough shapes really quick so with that done we want to lay the mesh on here and i'll tell mocha down here that i'm interested in tracking some mesh with this little checkbox and critically we want this mesh layer to be below the hands so that it'll ignore those kind of blobs that i put out there then we just need to dial in how the mesh should be generated you might want some automatic triangles for more organic results or maybe you want a regular grid just make sure you tap generate when you change all of your options but i want you to look really close in here see all these little points the more of these we have the more nuanced our mesh is going to be but the longer it's going to take to calculate so you may need to find a balance that works for your shot and you can always add more points and more specific points using the mesh tools up here i'm happy with the regular grid and i'll just kind of decrease the size here hit generate again we're ready to let the tracking happen while we wait i do want to say that if you like what you see here and you want to get some mocha in your life then there are links to get a license for this lovely bit of kit right here in the description below and if you happen to be watching this thing around black friday cyber monday american thanksgiving time well there is a sale going on so please avail yourself of those savings at boris fx and look at that we're done so magic editing as we scrub through here we can see how well these points stuck on the surface as i'm plucking at the fabric or shifting around i'm pretty happy with the data that it's generated so let's move that data into after effects we want to use the stabilize module down here to push the deformations into after effects so we'll be going to the first frame here going into the stabilize tab here choosing on warp and selecting high quality one final thing we have to do though we need to basically make one of these frames the reference frame so i moved the playhead back to the beginning here and to make this deformation work we're going to need the surface to interpret this thing how we expect so i'm going to show the planar surface by clicking this button up here and then i'm going to expand that surface to the frame bounds clicking this other button this little change will make the deformation apply to the entire frame when we apply it on the next step so make sure you don't skip this critical thing expanding expanding this blue box out to the size of the entire frame now we should be good to go so let's save and close down mocha and then we're gonna go back into after effects so now we need to have something to put on the shirt and i have this little comp of my logo so i'll bring that down here i've animated the letters in a very simple way we don't really need to talk about that this could be literally anything anything at all but whatever we want to put on here let's put our playhead to that reference frame kind of arrange this where we want it okay and i'm happy with that location so now i'm going to pre-compose this logo and if there were other elements we wanted to put on here we'd pre-compose those along with it and we're going to make sure that we're moving all the attributes to the new comp meaning that this comp i just made is going to have the same frame size as this comp here where the data is coming from making sure these things line up is going to be important so now here comes the magic trick i'm going to copy that mocha plug-in effect i'm going to paste it onto the new comp the things that are going to live on the shirt so all of that data we made all that tracking mesh stuff lives inside this instance of the effect as well then we're going to twirl in here to module renders we're going to click this little checkbox because we would like to see one of those renders please and we're going to choose stabilize warp so we unwarped it inside of mocha now we're going to warp out here see how that kind of works and then we get to observe the magic look at that pull look at that snap back ooh so smooth so simple but it's just that easy so now we get to go in here and we can treat up this comp which is warping along however we'd like i'm going to put in a little fractal noise very small scale in there pretty dark just to help kind of blend this with my heather gray t-shirt then we're going to go back out here set this layer to multiply blending modes are our friend and then we're just going to dial down the opacity and that should do it if only things were always this easy in particular i had this one job once where we needed to put some fire on some american ncaa football boys and we didn't have much time to nail down a particle sim or to put 3d tracked points on people but this is a very similar shot to what we were working with and i'm going to show you just how much time the power mesh saves us in our workflow here this guy is being nice and stable nice and planar oh and then he starts twisting oh no why must he twist himself towards the camera how am i going to track fire on his torso if he's moving around like this but don't despair power mesh is here we're going to use the same method as before which i'm going to skip over because we literally just did that and we're going to get our mesh tracked on here but instead of using the mesh to warp things i have other plans i'm going to take this mesh and we're going to go back into after effects i'm going to turn this mesh into nulls that are going to follow all those wee little points that are out on that mesh and i really just need a few of them if few select key points out here then we're going to use to drive a puppet pin tool to get some fire elements to seem to stick to little parts of his body pretty clever right this is some high angle fire from action vfx i think that'll work pretty well and you can see these little fingers these little strands of fire kind of emanating that's going to work great for what i'm after here so i'm going to position that fire kind of close to where i want then i'm going to pre-compose this again moving all the attributes to the new comp now things can get messy with pins and relative space so i'm just going to start by making this this fresh comp here big enough so that we can see all the fire we want to see all the fire in here and then i'm going to make a black solid since i intend to use like add or screen to composite this back with the original so we should be good should we could set up with this so now we're gonna go back to that previous comp i'm gonna drop down puppet pins on or near where those nulls are at now this can be a mildly time-consuming process of parenting the position of the pin to the position of the null making sure you get the right ones lined up and once you're done you may need to adjust the layer a little bit because the size difference between the comp and the frame but now have a look at this those pins are following the points and it's like the flames are stuck right on the back they're squishy and they're twisting as he's moving it's like the fire is really coming off of his i guess this is called a jersey maybe now i'm just going to drop a couple more pins towards the top of the fire to help kind of bend and shape it so the fire seems to be flowing you know vertically as heat rises and uh then we are done i i kind of weep for all the hours spent uh in the past after seeing the tools of the present it's a common common feeling but don't be too sad you can get your hands on power mesh with mocha pro as long as you're up to date with your license so again please enjoy using the link in the description to go make that happen i hope you've enjoyed learning about this new tool the power mesh is also great for assisting in rotoscoping complex organic forms since it's gonna move and deform as those shapes move and deform and as heaps of other applications you'll be spending more time on the creative parts of compositing and less time on the tracking parts which always makes for better results if you've enjoyed learning about this kind of thing do subscribe we get up new tutorials all the time on all kinds of things about after effects motion design visual effects topics make sure you turn on notifications so you don't miss a thing and if you have any questions do let me know in the comments and i'll try to help you out thank you so much for watching and i'll see you around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 34,551

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, power, mesh, mesh warp, wrap, unwarp, unwrap, texture, shirt, skin, comples, organic, complex, surface

Id: Io7SP48eH7s

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020