Digital Makeup with Blender

    Can we afford some actual makeup artists, who will turn our actors into some jaw dropping visual effects characters who are covered with gore, blood, bolts, cables, jelly or whatever is required?
Or can we do that all digitally?

     The basic idea for digtal makeup is easy, as long as you do not think about it too long. Just have a digital double, track the head, body, limbs or whatever, apply the textures, props or clothes to that digital version of your actor and composite it over the actual footage of your actor. Here’s an example from Sebastian König:

Digital Makeup in Blender from Sebastian König on Vimeo.



Second Face Deform Test from Sebastian König on Vimeo.



     As seen in the example Sebastian used object markers for tracking various points on his face, but doing it this way can lead to problems with tracking when a character makes turns a certain way, or has hair in there face, or even a fast movement could mess up the tracking. There will soon be another method added for tracking that will address this issue. We don’t have a kind of tracking called planar tracking yet, but our awesome libmv developer Keir Mierle has something in the pipeline called “affine tracking”, which might help in this case. So with some luck we can do digital makeup without object-tracking.