Sub Surface Skin Tutorial

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to be taking a look at some cool subsurface skin effects and we've got Sam Lloyd here to help us out let's go and take a look at this final effect alright so we've got the menacing Sam Loya here now this was inspired by Iron Man 3 and the cool effects that did for the villains that have this fiery core now this particular shot is actually for commercial I'm working on for this new chewing tobacco so that's why we're kind of focusing on the one cheek and you know just really coming out great so a couple of things to kind of point out we get like a little bit of a parallax which makes it feel like there's depth and we also have different focus levels of the veins and of course make the eyes red so that you know he's a bad guy alright let's go and take a look at setting this up and show you some cool techniques along the way what we have here is some footage of Sam Loya turning around and looking up at something menacing and we'll go ahead and drop this into a new comp there we go and the first thing that we need to do is motion track the area of his face if we come over here to animation and choose track in mocha AE this will be our best bet but okay all right so now we're in mocha ae and this is a specialized tracking tool what we'll do is take the current time indicator go to the very end then want to come up here and select the Bezier splines tool now what we want to do is track this area of his face so what we'll do is come in here and that looks pretty good so what I'm trying to do is select the area of the face that doesn't include parts that are going to change very much so like the eye it might blink so I'm just going to take the corner of the eye and a little bit of the nose and then we'll just select a little bit of the face here and then what we can do is come over here and track backwards so click on that alright so now we have a really good track of the side of his face now I want to make sure I'm on the very last frame and they're going to come over here choose a line service and then we're going to choose export tracking data now I'm going to export the corner pin data and copy to the clipboard then if I return to After Effects I can start using this data so it'll do just create a new solid and was call this tracking data and we'll go to the very first frame and choose edit paste so we can take a look at this we've got this plane on the side of his face this looks great let me just add a grid and then we'll take the grid and put it before the corner pin effect and then we can just kind of see what this is looking like so let's just lower the opacity T now we can see that the area of his face that we tracked is staying pretty well connected to the grid this is going to be important later on when we start creating all of the different effects first thing I'm going to shut this layer off and one of the things I want to point out is that we align the track to the very last frame of the animation so I want to do all of our design and all of our creation on the last frame and then we'll track it back into the shot the next thing we'll do is build our illumination map so what I want to do is create a new solid and we'll call this noise and we'll come over here type in fractal and we want to bring out the fractal noise drop that on there now we're going to go ahead and set this up so fun way to use fractal noise it's just select the parameter and open up the brainstorm feature and this is pretty cool it just kind of gives you a bunch of random things and you can change the randomness here click through it and find some cool settings so if you're trying to create energy or different kind of procedural effects this is a good way to start now I was hoping it would just be set up the way I want but unfortunately one have to go and do it manually pretty much how most brainstorm sessions go mostly just a waste of time so what we're going to do is come over here let's set this to dynamic and that way it kind of looks bubbly so you can kind of see feel free to make sound effects we're going to turn up the complexity it just adds more detail and we're going to turn up the scale as well so there we go okay so this is going to be our base illumination map now we want this to only be around the side of his face so let's go to the very end here take the pen tool and let's draw a shape around the area we want to keep so we'll come in here we'll just do something like okay turn it back on and we can hit F and that will bring up the mask feather properties which we can then that they're out a bit okay this fractal noise is going to be illuminated underneath the skin and so now we need to create the outside skin so that we can actually kind of see that something is beneath the outer area now here's a screenshot I found online that was done in modo and what we can see is that the skin is somewhat translucent and there's a light coming through now the bones are blocking that light now instead of bones blocking the light we're actually going to create a layer of veins that's going to block out that core energy and create this illuminated character now speaking of character we've got to give it up for Sam Loya here always brings his a game I found some new tips when I work with him instead of saying things like okay there's a big robot fighting you I just say things like we're not going to lunch later and all of a sudden what Robert DeNiro okay we need to start creating our vein network so if we come over to the project I've got a couple of different vein elements that we'll be using now I'm going to go ahead take this first one drop it out here make sure we're on the last frame so we're going to come over here the mode set this to multiply and what we want to do is just create some veins in some interesting areas so you know coming out of the eye here we can scale this down a bit and we can duplicate it rotate it scale it I'm here duplicate rotate now it doesn't matter if the veins go outside of this area what I'm focusing on is where they overlap in this middle area now I have this other element we'll bring this out now I'm going to invert it so that it's black on white so a Channel invert and we'll set it to multiply scale it down a bit and I want to add a fast blur so we'll choose effect blur fast blur and by blurring this out we're going to create some more depth now I'm going to hit T let me lower the opacity a little bit and then what I can do is take some of these other vein elements duplicate them maybe scale them up and also add a fast blur so maybe you know a few pixels for or so just so we can start seeing different layers some that are sharp and some of that are out of focus now we'll take this blurred one duplicate it again maybe put one on this side so this is starting to get crazy but we can work it in a little bit more later so what I want to do now is start combining these two passes so we'll take all of the veins hold down shift and we can select those layers and we're going to choose layer pre-compose now it's probably at the bottom of the list but pre-compose is the way to go ctrl shift c we're going to move all the attributes we'll call this a vein Network and we'll double click on that and we're going to add a white solid and they'll hit OK and let's move it to the bottom so that way our whole background is white so close that now we'll take our noise turn it back on and that's this element here and let's set the track matte to luma matte so essentially what we're doing is subtracting the veins from the area of the illumination and this is going to make it feel like we're blocking out the light now I can take our veins here we can add a little bit of a blur maybe a fast blur here like a one pixel just to soften it a bit and we can play around with the vein Network in a second but what we want to do now is take these two layers and precompose them so we'll select them both layer pre-compose again and this is going to be called the illumination now we'll open that up again and in this case we're going to create a black solid that we're going to put into the back so there we go come back so now what we want to do is set the transfer mode of our illumination map to something like color dodge and that's going to knock out the black color so that we just have the illumination alright so let's go and start working on the look now I'm going to start out with a curves adjustment and what we'll do is go to the red Channel and just punch this up a bit so now you can see we're starting to add some color and I'll go to the blue Channel bring this down a bit and then to the green Channel we're going to create a contrast curve here and this is where it is look at this starting to get there now this is why it's important to have a black solid in the background because without it the color starts to look a little bit weird as it blends with the Alpha and if I were to compare that the color correction works a lot better on an image without an alpha Channel so this is looking pretty good I think it's time to do some tracking data what do you guys think all right so we've got our tracking data here I can select it all again edit copy and then we'll take our lumination map here let's go to the very first frame and we'll choose edit paste oh so now look at this we've got this illumination on our skin this is starting to get somewhere now it gets a little bit tricky as his head turns basically what I did was just added a fast blur and just kind of cranked it up as he turned his head and I'm not saying this is the best solution or anything but so whatever is going to make it look a little less obvious so far pretty good we've got the basic idea here we could go ahead and track in an eye color as well if we want to track the eyes we can come back to MOCA lock our first layer and then create a shape around the eye and track that as well so we'll just go ahead and track backwards alright so we've got our eye track what I'm going to do is choose export tracking data and instead of the corner pin I'm just going to take the transform data will copy the clipboard go back to After Effects create a new null object and we'll call this left eye and we'll go to the very first frame and choose edit paste and then what we'll do is hit a and I'd like to just get rid of the anchor point and then set the anchor point to zero by zero and that way that point will be on the eye so you can see here nice and I also don't think we need the scale or rotation for this and then we'll create a new solid that is sort of like an orange color and we'll set this to color dodge and we'll select the eye here and we'll hit F feather out the eye so kind of the same thing we just did and maybe take the pen tool and select the top of the eye and we'll just sort of subtract this part out and we'll feather that as well F and then we'll take that orange layer and parent it to the left eye now we may have to do some keyframes on the mask in order for it to kind of stay where it's supposed to be you know what this is gonna take too long anybody got time for keyframes I'm just gonna feather it out a bit but you guys should you know make it look good me I got to watch my kids wherever the hell they are all right so this looks pretty good but it doesn't feel like there's really much depth behind the surface so what we want to do is try to add a little bit of depth by creating our own parallax now if this were a 3d tract scene we wouldn't have to worry about this but in this case what we're going to do is find out how his head moves so his head moves and it kind of stops about right here so what we'll do is we'll open up the illumination map comp and we'll take the noise and hit P and set a position keyframe then we're going to hit m and set a keyframe for the mask path as well so if we hit you you'll see that we have a keyframe on our mask path and on our position so what we'll do is we'll come back here and we'll slide over in time to maybe about here all right so to create a little bit of parallax what I'm going to do is take the Pan behind tool and what this allows you to do is move a layer without moving the mask so in this case we've already created a keyframe for the mask path and the position so that whatever we do now will interpolate so we'll take this tool drag to the left and then hold down shift and this is also what I mean by parallax as I slide this back and forth so what I'm going to do is click and drag to the right and that's going to create this kind of a movement and then we'll go past it and move it over to the left all right so this is our basic parallax movement let's take a look and see what it looks like in the animation so we'll go and hit zero okay so you can definitely see what's going on here that back layer is moving faster as he turns his head so it feels like there's something behind it now it's probably a little bit too fast so we're probably going to want to just bring this down a bit what we could do is maybe just move the key frames over shorten that distance a bit and let's take a look at that all right so to refine the animation I might go back into the illumination map maybe move the illumination up a bit hit F even feather it out more so that it's a little bit more dispersed maybe get some of these veins away from his eye a little bit let's see that one this this main one maybe just kind of move it over also if I want to block out his eye entirely what I can do is take our footage of Sam hit edit copy paste it into this layer and then choose layer guide layer and what that will do is allow us to see it in here but it won't render in the final comp so if we come in here maybe I want to just wipe out the eye entirely so I can just create a white solid and hide that and then just create a mask around his eye hit F and this will just wipe out any of the areas that's touching that so check this out now I don't have any more veins coming out of that area but the veins are cool so you know you could just play around scale them down maybe move them around until you get like a nice cool look I think having some good detail really helps especially around the edges where it fades out and that's going to just give it a nice more you know vibrant look the other thing we want to do is just sort of like overall color correction so we'll do an adjustment layer maybe a curves adjustment and maybe just add a little bit of contrast here go to the red channel and just bring the red down a touch and the blue channel let me just add a little bit of that warmth cool now the other thing we could do is add some glow so some glow on top of everything so what we can do is take this illumination map duplicate it and add a big fast blur to it so there we go and maybe lower the opacity and that just creates kind of a more overall illuminated look now the other last thing I think I did is I took the vein Network just the layer with the veins on it copied it and paste it back into the main comp now I need to paste our tracking data back onto it so let's take the tracking data let's sit here and paste it into the vein layer since it's inside of that comp and then set this to like multiply and make a selection just around the area here and then lower the opacity and maybe just a little bit of a fast blur you know again this is just a subtle touch maybe a color burn might look a little better see shift plus and minus allows you to cycle through the transfer modes actually classic color burn classic alright guys well I hope you enjoyed the tutorial be sure to think about other ways you can use this technique you know motion tracking faces and you know all that kind of stuff is a very powerful technique that you could do a lot of different things with and of course be sure to check out the website Video Copilot dotnet we have some cool things happening on our blog thanks again for watching I'm Andrew Kramer and we'll see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 1,362,457

Keywords: andrew kramer, video copilot, iron man 3, after effects

Id: iBNMQNIISUg

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2013