After Effects skin smoothing – best way to do it…

[Spencer Tweed]

That is one way of doing it, but not recommended for faces. You’ll notice a null only has position, rotation and scale. You’re missing skew and perspective, which are going to be essential. Check out my post below and do a bunch of Mocha tutorials – that’s the way to do this professionally!

If you dig around I’m certain there’s a mocha “beauty” tutorial out there which goes over this exact step. It’s done all the time in the industry with just Mocha and AE. The process is a bit confusing for a beginner, but there are certainly some pretty detailed videos out there.

– Spencer

[Harry Snell]

Thank you. Is this the effect you are referring to?

https://borisfx.com/downloads/?&product=Mocha%20Pro

[John Cuevas]

You shouldn’t copy the tracked bit, after you track the footage you would “apply” the tracking data to the selected layer, in this case the null.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[Ross Shain]

There are lots of ways to accomplish “skin smoothing”. Both Boris FX plug-in products (Continuum and Sapphire) have skin smoothing with integrated Mocha masking to isolate the face tracking:

This video covers Continuum Beauty Studio (inside Premiere): https://borisfx.com/videos/retouching-faces-in-adobe-premiere-pro/

And Sapphire Beauty also now has integrated Mocha masking: https://borisfx.com/effects/sapphire-beauty/

Or if you have AE, you can use the integrated Mocha AE for tracking face masks to isolate blurs & grain. etc

Lastly – this video shows how extreme you can get with 2D digital beauty & touch up techniques:
https://borisfx.com/videos/digital-makeup-age-techniques-with-boris-fx-mocha-and-after-effects/

Hope this helps.

Ross Shain
Boris FX / Imagineer Systems
https://borisfx.com/products/mocha/

[Spencer Tweed]

Yes, but that’s the pro version. There is a free version with AE that does everything you need.

– Spencer

[Harry Snell]

Thanks for all the replies guys – I appreciate it.

I’ve not had any success with Mocha as it crashes in CS6 due to an “Open GL error”.

I’ve tried this tut and it worked pretty well on one clip that I’m using it with:

https://vimeo.com/51447970

However, when the face comes closer to the screen, it doesn’t work anymore.

– Any ideas to get around this?

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[Spencer Tweed]

I ran into that error before. I’m sorry I don’t remember the exact fix, but there was something I turned off in the preferences which handled it. I had just googled it, so the solution is out there (it didn’t take too long to find).

– Spencer

[Harry Snell]

I did have a look around on Google, but none of the threads seemed to have an answer unfortunately.

[Spencer Tweed]

I think it might have been under Output Settings > Rendering > Use Hardware Rendering. (turn that off)

– Spencer

[Harry Snell]

Thanks, I’ll check that out 🙂