[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Check out this post. It points to a site where you can find a great script that will allow you to animate using inverse kinematics. Watch the tutorials- you can use this combined with tracking to achieve what you’re after.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

So, what you are asking is advice on how to do an intro like the one in the link you posted?

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

You may want to see this tutorial from this thread.
That is the base principle for displacement maps in AE.
I would recommend using Free Form to do the displacement and position in 3D. Here is a tutorial about using Free Form.
To animate the displacement map use Mesh Warp or Puppet Tool.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

My guess is that the Rotobrush mask was jittery on the edges and that will make any patch obvious. A shape in Mocha will give you a solid matte. I suggest you make one mask for the bedsheets so you can comp them on top, and another mask for the skin patch that you can feather substantially to blend it in. Not knowing how big the underwear is I can not say for sure, but from what I saw in the clip you posted, it should not be a problem to match skin under the mask by offsetting the image. No blurring will work because it will destroy the skin texture and it will be very obvious.
One thing you may want to try is to track the actual underwear and export corner pin data from Mocha. Then build a clean patch in PSD and apply that with Match Grain in AE using the Corner Pin data. One tip- I am not sure if this can be done in a different way – maybe someone else can jump in and offer advice for both of us- but when exporting the corner pin data from Mocha and applying it to a patch layer, I have experienced a serious offset for the patch. The solution I found was to open Corner Pin, select all keyframes from each of the 4 point (one at a time) and adjust the position by sliding the numeric values (if you try to enter it by clicking on it and typing it in it will only do it for the keyframe on which the cursor is on in the timeline and it will not offset all keyframes).

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Track the camera move. Roto around the underwear- you do not have to be tight on the skin, only where the mask touches the bedsheets. Mocha is the tool to do this in my opinion.
Comp the clip on top of itself and slide the layer under to show skin from above the underwear. You may need to combine two masks- one feathered for the skin and another just for clean edges where the bedsheets are.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Glad to hear that- now thinking about it, I figured that rendering the particles at a higher frame rate and then importing the rendered layer in a regular comp would have given you a better result… I guess better late than never.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Unless one has an Apple id the link does not work. Post it somewhere else so we can see it. Without that it may be hard to give specific advice.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Morphing always works well. The problem is that your wheel is all white- it would have been more interesting had it been of some color with a design or just text on it. That would’ve given you more to work with. You can try to combine a morph (here is a link where I describe a simple AE native morphing technique in another post) with CC Flo Motion (use to create a pulsating wheel right before the beginning of morph), Trapcode Shine maybe and a dash of Camera Shake for drama.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Vector drawings are best if you can achieve the look you’re after with that. Puppet tool can be pretty intricate- you need to separate the parts of a character that you want to animate on separate layers (like the hair) and parent them to each other (head to neck, neck to torso and so on). You can also use Distortion tools- Mesh Warp can prove quite useful. One of the techniques used in anime is morphing – instead of having all the in betweens, the character (or part of it) morphs from one position to the next. Mesh Warp can be used for that. Here is a link to another post where I explain a simple morph:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/992175

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

AE is capable of animating in various ways. For your kind of project I would recommend you start by researching the Puppet Tool.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist