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Sweat Removal for Movie Scene
Hello Im working on a Scene of a film and the Director is requesting that I remove sweat from a actor in a particular hiking scene. Is there any tips on what tools or techniques that would be best used to accomplish this? The Director wants the actor to look dehydrated.
Im using Adobe After Effects CC 2017 and have Photoshop.
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2 Replies
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Hard to saw without seeing the actual footage.
However, as far as facial sweat, I’d say use Mocha to track masks around the facial features, to isolate the sweaty skin.
Then reduce any specularity — any shinyness — One way would be to “clamp” the highlights using Levels and “clip to output white” ON, and set the output at the brightest skin tone, but darker than the specular, glistening sweat.
Adjust the gamma to get the skin tone right while clipping off all the specularity.
Also, desaturating a bit will help with the “dehydrated” look.
Also, if you’ve tracked in Mocha for the mask, you could sue the track data for a “grunge layer’, something that could be overlaid to affect the texture of the skin. One possibility is to take a high res image of dry, cracked skin and scale it appropriately and track it, then either ADD (or possibly MULTIPLY depending on the elements) it onto the plate.
If you ADD it, you’d need an adjustment layer with levels and the same tracked masks to bring the white levels back down, but an advantage here is that use of levels will also help suppress the specular highlights of the sweat.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
This does really depend on the shot, but I think Flame’s Motion Warp Tracking or NUKE’s Smart Vectors fits this kind of work more naturally than the Ae toolset does.
Tracking the sweat with Mocha and replacing it with painted patches might be worth trying in Ae, as would a dedicated plugin like Beauty Box.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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