How would you guys attack this shot?

[Kristianthu]

This is what i received:


And i was supposed to place a motion captured face on these dolls with the same texture as the doll itself.

Working with gradients and moving lights is something i have litte experience with and this was a difficult task.

What i ended up doing was cleaning up the tracking markers, bluring hardand just getting the facial shape with only shadows and highlights using blending modes to keep the flowing lights on the plate.

This is how it ended up. Its is not physically accurate, but i feel it worked okay. had 4 days to 3D track, clean up, render and composite 6 very different shots.



I am interested in knowing if you guys have some ideas that would work better than this? I dont know if my method was too time consuming and also not as good as it could be.

[ShadowMaker SdR]

I'd love to see your result in motion. It looks like a really difficult job. The still looks pretty cool.

[Kristianthu]

I updated my original post with the result. I felt smart when i projected the dilated cleaned part onto my mesh to then use as a base in comp, but i feel the quality across those 6 shots i did was not very consistent. The lighting movement and intensity varied very much.

[intelligent machine]

As an experiment I might try a 3d camera solve. If I knew the distance between the two dummies, even better.
Then for the lighting effect: I'd use a neutral gray matte material on the 3d geometry. Blur, desaturate and adjust the contrast of the original plate and project that over the 3d geometry from the solved camera with no other lights.

Then I'd tell the on-set to set everything in focus (looking at that BG dummy), take good measurements, and not use a fog machine.

[Guido]

If I had been shooting that shot for post I would've covered the mannequin with black polka dot markers, dispensed with the tape and shot with fixed lighting, I would've also done the moving lights in 3D too and had a lightcatcher/shadow catcher in 3D and comp that over the original plate.

The obvious question I have is why they didn't do the shot in 3D from start to finish? Perhaps it's more clear from other angles.

I think you did an excellent job with a shot that could've been a lot easier if it had been shot differently.

Added in 10 minutes 45 seconds:

Then I'd tell the on-set to set the lens focus to infinity.

Why would you want the foreground dummy out of focus?

[andromeda_girl]

apart from being desperately confused as to why it would be shot that way,
and amazed someone didn't have a brilliant idea of not even adding tracking markers,
or even larger ones,
or ones the same colour as the mannequin, ffs...
and trying to wrap my head around whether or not that is red spray paint suddenly covering the head,
or if that is actually red light...
we are of course seeing a highly compressed version- but assuming it isn't hiding any flaws, i'd say you did a great job on this.
the vast majority of this shot being successful is in a decent3D camera track and it appears you have that covered.

[intelligent machine]

Why would you want the foreground dummy out of focus?

Ah. I changed that to hyperfocal but it didn't update because another post came through before I guess.

[MelbFilm]

I think you've done a really good job with what you were given. I would have follow a similar approach to IM. My only comment is that the face feels like it exhibits a little more subsurface scattering than the rest of the dummy.

[Kristianthu]

Cool! It seems my method was the way to go, but i would have loved to have a bit more time to do even more refinements to the comp.

The shots were a real struggle, but a welcome challenge. I love that the shots were hard to do as long as they looked as good as they did.

Thanks for the feedback guys! I feel a bit less stressed about my delivery no