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hey,
I’m a student at an art college and I’m working on my thesis, which in my school, is a visual fx short. In one scene for my thesis I have to make it look as if a tattoo is animating on my live action character who is moving around. the tattoo is really intensive. it needs to wrap around the arms and face of my character so i’m not sure a simple track will cut it.
I’m wondering what is the best way, that looks the most professional, to do this? My background is mostly in After Effects and a bit of PF Track, Sillouette, and Maya. I’m also going to take a Nuke class this coming semester but I’m not sure how far past the basics we’re going to get. If you have any suggestions for how to do this with these programs it will be most appreciated – simply not going to have enough time to learn another program.oh, and i was thinking of making a 3d model of my character in maya and then add the image sequence of the animated tattoo as the texture then render out with the alpha, however, i know i’m going to also have to rig and animate my model and i’m thinking this might take a long time and might not be the best or quickest way to do this.
Thanks so much!
Yeah, that’s a tricky one.
What I’d personally do/try is to get an camera & object track out of PFTrack or some equivalent and then make a primitive cylinder (or whatever would be a decent analog for the various parts) and texture said cylinder w/ the animation in Maya.
Which is to say pretty much like you were planning. 🙂
You may be able to get lucky with some mesh warping/bicubics (I don’t know what AE or Nuke calls that, but it’s an image plane w/ bezier handles that you can move in 3d space) as well.
If you can, try to shoot and edit it so that there’s a minimum of 3d tracking needed.
Always remember, the trick to VFX is to cheat whenever possible. If it looks right, it is right afterall.
Yep you’re looking at doing a matching mesh element to follow the contours of your character either by hand or as an object track in pftrack / syntheyes. It’ll need a minimum of 8 points visible at all stages to solve for each limb you want to track and the more you have the better since you can use these to position your mesh to stick to the body surface. I’ve done digital tattoos before on a persons back that didn’t move too much and it was okay with warping but if they’re going to move a lot you’ll get it done quicker getting a good 3d track and making a surface you can map the tattoo on.
Yes this is Exact Match Move………
first of all make sure where the tatoo is placed . if suppose you are gonal place your tatoo in plain surface u want to first take a photo snap of it and try it out in photoshop and then to video softwares ot else in blended surface then try to use blending modes and distort option included with blur …… then try to work with PF Track / Bojou for traking your file .Make sure that the area which you are covering to track must be in same camera angle if the angle changes then you have to split up the shots based on the camera angles and do seperate track for every change in the moment .i was going to do something like this for a music video a while back. only got to look dev before the band went with another idea, but other than the obvious tracking issues you also want to nail down the actual look of the tattoo. Whether you’re going for something more line art or some other kind of toon shading. back then I was looking at tomcat for maya but there might be a more elegant solution now. when I was at Psyop, they used XSI’s toon shader with great success.
probably want to find yourself a skin texture to pipe through any closeups. maybe a freckle or 2 interior on the tattood area. would be a nice subtlety!
I saw a beer commercial (think it was a european brew… heinken?) that did this effect about a year or so ago and I was like, “darn, someone beat me to it…” but ain’t that always the case? 🙂 if you can track it down, it had some nice compositing.
i did a few commercials with tattoo tracks last year, the tattoo was a nice PSD file…all tracked and comped in flame
if you have the ability to use 2 cameras, you might have some luck leveraging the stereo capabilities of pfTrack, esp if you do not anticipate having much parallax. 2 offset cameras would allow you to see more around the body, and allow you to construct a tighter mesh.
Here is a similar sounding effect that I tested recently…although the subject is not moving as this is just a simple camera projection. The clip also shows a simple breakdown of how I did this…good luck!
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