Tattoo your face in Davinci Resolve 18! (surface tracker effect)

today we're going to look at the surface tracker in davinci resolve it's pretty self-explanatory obviously it tracks surfaces and then if you wanted to maybe for example this shirt if you wanted to put a new logo on here and even if this wrinkles or the person turns a little bit you can still composite your logo over what you have on the t-shirt but it's not just used for things such as clothing today i'm going to show you how we're going to track people's faces and what we can do to composite things over that there are other tracking options within davinci resolve such as planar tracking which will track a flat surface like the wall behind me or 3d tracking where it will track the 3d scene and this way you can put objects within the scene but the surface tracker is nice because it will actually move with your subject we're actually only covering a small portion of it here in this video so if you're interested in seeing a more in-depth tutorial about this let me know and subscribe to the channel but for right now let's take a look the first thing that we want to do is search for the surface tracker in our effects library we can drag it into our node window and make sure that it's connected to our other nodes now i'll try to locate a frame that shows the woman on the right's face straight on the first option in the effect is called bounce this is going to be the area that we want to track and whatever we want to composite into our footage will be located in so since we are trying to track faces in this video i will click around the outside of her face adding more points the next button in the effect is called mesh resolve triangulates lines to match what is seized as a surface of the item or the person you'll notice that the lines meet right over her pupils and most of the other features on her face from there the next button is track because we aren't at the beginning or ending of the clip we will use this icon to track the footage back and forth of course if needed there are options to track back one frame or only backwards and the same with tracking only forwards from that point as you'll notice in the keyframe window at the bottom resolve has created a number of keyframes which reflect what we just did with the track on the surface tracker effect you can see that it did a great job of sticking to the features that it is tracking on her face however you may notice a point off to the right that loses its location near the beginning of the clip it starts off as a straight line through a few points but then one of them slides and it creates this larger angle between the points in the effect there is an option called mesh rigidity it starts off as 0.5 but what i can do is change it to 1 which makes it more rigid let's track this backwards and forward again now if i scrub through the footage and look at that area again you'll notice that it still continues to follow the same features but the points of the mesh will be less influenced by whatever it's seeing in the bounds so let's look at this footage and we will do the same thing first thing we need to do is draw a bounding area around our subject's face once that's created we can click on mesh and see what resolve determines is the surface of the face in order to create that mesh it does mostly a good job as it did with the last footage but if i scroll through the footage you can see that our subject smiles we are going to composite a painted face over our subject and with the way that we have the setup now all it would do was warp that composited asset it won't ever show us his teeth if we click on bounds we can actually create a part of the bounds to ignore when making the mesh and that's called a hole there's a button labeled as whole and if we click on that we can now click around his mouth over our footage we could of course do the same thing with his eyes but just for the purposes of demonstration we'll stay with just the mouth and click on mesh if we want a more precise track we can just add more lines under the mesh window on the effect we can adjust the number there under the point number alliance option on the track window we can leave everything at the default and because we're not on the first and last frame we can choose the option for tracking back and forth now just for an example i'm going to drag in a png file with transparency into our node area by doing that it will set the image as matte if i click on the highlight option then that node this is what we see in order to composite this over our footage we take the green output of that node and connect it up to the green connector of the surface tracker node we can now see the davinci logo on our subject's face from there we take the top blue connector and connect it to the bottom one of our surface tracker node and it removes everything except what was in the white area of the mat that i showed you the other blue connectors are just different ways of compositing that image over our footage and what i'll do now is connect and disconnect the lines from the different blue points on the mat to the effects node we can finally head over to the last window on the surface tracker effect called result the option for interaction displays will show the bounds and the mesh what i will do here is just choose the height option so we're not distracted by the bounds right now you also have the option to adjust the opacity in the composite node such as multiply or screen or whichever makes sense for whatever you're compositing over your footage the overlay placement section is where we are going to do most of our work one of the choices that you have is an interactive canvas instead of adjusting parameter screw settings you can adjust them in the window first thing that you want to do is click the reference button because that is a frame you need to do it on which is why it's important to choose an appropriate frame to start on because i chose hide we can't see it so i'll choose the option to show and now i can grab the points in the window and start adjusting our resolve logo however i see fit personally i like to use the sliders when switching between the options just note that it resets its position i can now come in and make adjustments to things like zoom and the x and the y positions and i can adjust those parameters only restricted by the area we're designated by the bounds that we created because we're compositing this over a mesh if i adjust the location we can see that the mesh is following the surface of his face and adjusting itself accordingly we also have the option for pitch in yaw which is just our image in the way that you can see in the footage window if we don't need the aspect to stay the same as the original we can also adjust the width and height separately i've moved the location of the image and you may notice that the hole we created doesn't seem to cover his mouth entirely if i head to the top of the effect and click on mesh we can see what is happening what we can do is come into the footage and move one of the points and that will adjust the keyframe accordingly of course we would have to do this for each keyframe and that may make it tedious so now i will head back to the tracking section of our effect and underneath our tracking options there are options to remove tracking data i'll click on the one that removes all the tracking data from before that particular frame and it will disappear from the keyframe window as expected and then we can just track backwards now if we scrub the rough footage it outlines his mouth a little bit better we can also hold ctrl and draw a line in our viewer selecting some points and then we can manipulate them however we want including rotating scaling and stretching i can also select multiple points click somewhere in the middle and then drag those points out or in as needed now let's connect up our mat as we did in the other example and let's head to result and make some adjustments there once we have it in place there are additional options up top to soften the transition and expand or contract the mat i'll make one or two other adjustments and you'll see as i scrub through the footage that when he smiles the image that we composited over his face adjusts with his face let's say that we want to change the color of the face paint if we attempt to make any changes using the curves for example and we have the mat selected nothing will happen what we have to do is route the mat into another node first we can connect them up similarly to the way that we did with the effect if i choose highlight and select our new node we can see exactly what we are compositing over our footage then we can connect the green output to the second green output and then the blue at the bottom to the other blue at the bottom now with that particular node selected we can make any adjustments that we want one last thing i want to mention i think works nicely with the face paint is changing the composite mode to hard light in this new footage i've tracked the man's face that is turned to the side if we connect up our node the image is way too large for the bounding area we created let's head over to the results section of our effect and once again as you saw in the other example when i start moving it around you'll notice it follows the contours of his face another thing we can do to make this seem more realistic is change the opacity on the compositing section of the effect if we scrub through the footage it sticks nicely to the side of his face i didn't notice however that the image was slipping a little bit so what we can do to fix that is to adjust the amount of tracking points and then on the next screen we are going to change it from faster to better which i personally notice is an accurate term for this effect so i always suggest that you use that i disconnected our mat while we did that so now i'll reconnect it and then we can move the image again to get it back in the place that we want it and as i play through the footage you can see that it rotates with this face and stays connected to it one last note i'd like to make is that you have to remember what this effect is for let's connect up a new image and use it as if it were a mask he had on his face as he turns to the side the mask follows but it isn't wrapping around the other side of his face remember this isn't a 3d scene so while the mask appears to turn with his face what's really happening is that all the points on the left hand side are getting pushed together for things like this i wouldn't use this particular effect when disconnecting the image and looking at the mesh it becomes a lot more obvious as i mentioned in the beginning of the video i'm probably going to do a second video on this especially if you are interested so let me know in the comment section below and that's because there's a lot of different scenarios which we can use with this effect thanks for watching if you don't want to miss any of those upcoming videos subscribe to the channel and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Post. Color. Gear.

Views: 36,083

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Id: -9whhbI_GvU

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022