Playing around again. This time I got the idea, that I’d like to try compositing a tattoo on a moving person. So I recorded a few seconds long clip of me moving my hand around, on which I would later composite something tattooish. I drew a grid of markers on my hand, so I’d have a nice reference for warping.

When I loaded the thing up in Shake, I noticed that it was missing a tool, that would really come in handy – Grid Warp. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Warper is great, but for this I could’ve really used the grid warp (so, if anybody knows of a plugin for that, or even if that tool does exist in Shake and I just missed it – please, let me know). Well, I ended up using the Warper, so I didn’t get all the flexes in the middle exactly as it should be, since I only had the shape on the outer markers (all nicely attached to a tracker – even that took me a while to figure out, since Warper’s shapes didn’t give me the option to attach the knots to trackers; so I had to make a standalone rotoshape, attach the knots to the trackers and then bake them and copy the shape back in the Warper). After that all I was left with was the marker removal (a little Quickpaint, combined with the trackers and I was all set).

It all came out quite nice for the 20 minutes I spent on it (most of which I spent searching the web for any information about Grid Warp and also trying to attach the knots to the tracker). I didn’t spend much time on making the tattoo believable. It was more of a warping/tracking/marker/etc. test. I still think it lacks the in between warping (the inner four points), but for that I’d need a grid warp… so…

Watch digital_tattoo_test.001.mov