The latest releases of Flame have seen some major improvements for beauty work. This, together with new beauty challenges for you to think your teeth into, warrants a second part to our series. With a total of four all-new production-level shots to work on, we’ll tackle not only the usual beauty work of removing spots and dimples, but also do tasks that are not beauty work themselves but often go hand-in-hand with beauty work.
These tasks include rebuilding a glare on top of your beauty work or stabilizing a shot using motion vector warping. In that spirit, the last shot of the course will be a great challenge for everybody, as we’ll do a complete relighting on a very close-up shot using SynthEyes and Flame in close combination.
This is truly a production-orientated course, meaning that each of our shots will be worked on from start-to-finish and forcing us to find solutions that fit the production reality of a real commercial production.
Christoph Zapletal is a Freelance Flame and Nuke artist and has been working in the industry for a little over twenty years. One of his specialities is beauty work and retouching. Beyond that, he is an Instructor at SAE Institute and a frequent contributor to Digital Production Magazine.
Class Listing
Class 1: Hair
We start with everyone’s favourite in beauty work: hair. We use Flame's new Motion Vector Tracking for roto, discuss its pros and cons, and see how the new Matte Viewer in the Gmask Tracer can help with that.
Class 2: Skin
Switching from hair to skin, we continue working on our shot from class one. This is a perfect opportunity to take an in-depth look at Flame’s two new beauty shaders, A2Beauty and the Washer, as well as Ivar Beer's incredible Cook Beauty.
Class 3: Eyes
This time it’s all about the eyes. We explore different techniques to get rid of red veins in the eyes and show how different approaches are sometimes needed for different eyes, even when they are in the same shot.
Class 4: Eyelashes
Continuing the shot from class four, we move on to patching the eyelashes, giving them a more even and smoother look. We also finish up this shot using various techniques on different regions of the skin and in the end, add more glossiness and volume to the actress' lips.
Class 5: Hair Retouching
Back to retouching hair, we take a different approach this time using motion vector tracking to project patches of hair. After that is done, we deal with a big lens flare which needs to be separated out of the original plate to added back on top of our fixes.
Class 6: Fingernails
With a combination of clever roto, Matchbox Shaders, and the Colour Warper we take care of the fingernails. To bring the shot across the finish line, we once again hijack motion analysis to smooth out the movement in the shot.
Class 7: Syntheyes, Part 1
We start working on the final shot for this course and take our first steps into Syntheyes, discussing object and manual tracking.
Class 8: Syntheyes, Part 2
We refine our shot in Syntheyes in order to get a more solid track. Once that is done, we look at getting proper geometry for our actress with as little modelling as humanly possible. Warning: This class contains some digital nudity.
Class 9: Syntheyes, Part 3
Still in Syntheyes, we import our geometry and align it with our track. Then we really get the geo into place by using the Smudge feature. Once all that is done, we discuss how to cleverly get our data from Syntheyes back into Flame.
Class 10: Flame relighting
In the final class of this course, we look at how to easily generate a camera track from our object track and why this is useful. After retouching our plate we get to the fun part of relighting our shot.