Tragic Hero

Firstly, I decided ti re-shoot some footage as my original footage was boring. I tracked with face tracker again, which wasn’t as smooth as with the old footage, but with some tweaking turned out fine.

I then found a under the sea background of YouTube, turned it into an image sequence and used it as my background. I used Grade nodes and Colour corrects to make the scene appear darker. I also masked the sea floor to make it less dark. I also used a Roto node to mask out a body shape, which i will fill later on.

Then I created a strand of hair in procreate and imported it into After effects. I then duplicated and grouped to create a full head of hair. Then I used the Wave Warp effect to create a floating like effect. I used a dark mask to help make the hair look like its actually coming from the head.

The face tracker went well. I think this is because my footage was so slow. The only things I had to key was the blinking which on reflection I might remove to make it look more inhuman. I had to include a roto to fill in gaps in my texture. I am also thinking about re shooting some more interesting footage that has more of a narrative. I am going to work with what i have for the moment.

So importing my new mesh with the added texture from Maya into Nuke turned out more complicated than expected. To incorporate it into my original mesh I needed to re-write the pin tool and read the geometry into that. This wasn’t so complicated however I was not happy with the outcome. The added 3D aspects were now visible, but the texture was all messed up.

So my tutor found another way through projecting. I still don’t fully understand the method but the outcome was much better however only for the front view. It was going to get really complicated if i wanted to make an effective 360 texture, so for now I am going to leave it and continue with the original script. If I have time at the end I will come back and have another attempt.

I wanted certain parts of my character to have more of a 3D effect and was unable to adjust the mesh in Nuke. So I exported the mesh as an OBJ using the writegeo node. I also exported the UV map of my texture and in Maya, used a Blimm to wrap it around my mesh. This allowed me to precisely bring out the faces where there are barnacles and piercings.

Using 4 angles of edits, which was originally 3 before I realized I needed a high angle for the footage, I used the texture builder plug in. I was fairly straight forward to follow. There were gaps in the mesh and various parts which looked wrong, so I used the roto paint to clean up. I used 3 different roto paint nodes so it didn’t slow down my script. Overall i am really happy with how it has turned out.

The rotoscoping took a long time but it was interesting to try it out on my own footage. I used larger markers for when i track my face, although I have since learnt that for industry standard they should be much smaller. For the moment I have just put in a dark blue back ground, but I aim to eventually create a ‘under the sea’ location. My roto was pretty rough and you can see white lines around the edge for a lot of it. This is OK for the projects, as I am putting my entire face over the top, however in industry I would need to be a lot neater.

Overall I didn’t mind the face builder step. It was frustrating at times, but once I got the hang of it, it was fine to use. I don’t really think the mesh looks like me, but hopefully once the texture is on you wont really notice.

This initial edit of my sea creature/witch/siren/monster. It took my quite a while to get this where i wanted it to be in Photoshop, but i think i’m finally getting the hang of the program in depth and am starting to make things look quite realistic. Obviously the hair isn’t very practical and I likely wont be able to include this in my final piece, however I thought it was a cool idea and I can use it at this stage. The 3D nature of the barnacles could also prove to be a problem later on, however my plan is to take my mesh of my face into Maya and 3D model the barnacles into the mesh. Hopefully this will work OK with the later on texturing. Besides thhat i’m very happy with everything else and believe it will work succesfully.

I quite enjoyed this tutorial. I found rotoscoping very therapeutic and like the experimental elements that you could do with the final piece.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdI8ckhsCz9/

Here are some screen shots of my experimentation for the first Photoshop tutorial. Although I have previous Photoshop experience, it is not extensive. I learnt lots of new things in this tutorial such as displacement maps and colour range selection