- Hi, I'm Mary Poplin with Boris FX,
and today I'm going to show you parameter tracking
using Mocha inside of the new Sapphire 2020.
Sapphire features powerful Mocha planar tracking
to drive parameters inside of LensFlare,
EdgeRays, Rays, Luna, Grunge, SpotLight, Aurora,
Zap, MuzzleFlash and FreeLens.
Parameter tracking isn't limited to a single location.
Multiple points can be tracked all at once
as seen here in the Zap filter.
I am gonna show you these techniques in After Effects,
but they work basically the same in all hosts.
Apply the effect,
use Mocha for parameter tracking
and adjust your effects controls.
Mocha parameter tracking in Sapphire
can drive a LensFlare hotspot and pivot.
It can provide motion for the four points
along the Zap spline and can place the moon in Luna.
There's a million applications for this great new feature.
So let's show you how parameter tracking works.
For my first example, I will show you how
to add a sun to the shot with S_LensFlare.
First, we drag and drop LensFlare
onto our clip in the timeline and After Effects.
Next, I click the Edit Mocha button.
In Mocha, you can see I am in the Essentials mode.
You can also see I have a pivot search area
and center point
and a hotspot search area and center point.
I will take the pivot point and the hotspot point
and drag them to the location I want them at.
But I can drag the search area
wherever the texture is in the scene
that will give me the movement for those points.
Mocha is a planar tracker,
but that's just a fancy way of saying a texture tracker.
As long as the texture is moving uniformly,
I can rest assured the Mocha tracker
will lock on to that location.
For the pivot point,
I will track the ground plane.
And here's a really cool trick.
In layer properties, I can go to link to track
and select, None.
And this will unparent the shape from the track.
This means every pixel that moves beneath that shape
will read like a scanner
and drive my pivots center point
without me having to animate the shape
as the ground plane moves off screen.
Now I will drag my hotspot point
to the mountains on the left side of the car,
because I can see in my shot
that those BG details are not as obscured
by the foreground car and because they're BG elements,
I know I can just track translation
and basically get the track of the camera movement for free,
which is good,
because there's no clouds in the sky to track for my sun.
Now I hit track forwards,
and this has been sped up so you don't have to wait.
And I can simply save and close Mocha,
which will apply the tracking data back in my host.
Back in AE, in my effects controls,
I can adjust my Lens Flare details to my liking
or use a preset and my Lens Flare
will track beautifully with my scene.
Make sure to check hotspot uses Mocha
to ignore the x, y position parameters
and apply that Mocha position to the hotspot.
You will also want to use bypass Mocha
to avoid using a Mocha matte to confine the Lens Flare.
I can now open the LensFlare designer
and browse to a new effect
or I can edit one myself in detail.
The LensFlare designer is a wonderful tool
with endless possibilities.
So while you can use one of our great canned flares,
you can also invent new ones
that belong only to your personal toolbox.
I can do the same thing for my headlights.
I open Mocha and with edit Mocha,
I select my light location and my light search area.
Track, save, close,
and I can even duplicate this effect
and simply edit in Mocha,
and move the light to the other headlight,
and it's perfect.
We can also use Mocha
to create occlusions for flares,
create complex outdoor scenes
and add new lighting effects to scenes
that transform them from bland to grand.
But what do you do
when you need to track multiple points
and deal with occlusions.
Let me show you using Zap,
an amazing tool you may have seen on shows
like "The Flash".
We are going to put lightning between our talents hands
with a little help from Mocha inside of Sapphire 2020.
I am going to fast forward
through the bulk of rotoscoping
but it took a good bit of time to do
as roto tends to do.
First, I apply my Zap effect.
Then I opened the preset browser by clicking on load preset.
There's tons of great presets available
and the looks run the gamut
from spiky frost to magical electricity.
I choose a look I like,
in this case, I like ataxia alura.
I can really dive into the effects
and mess with varying endpoints,
branchiness, curve and wrinkle to get different effects.
But we are going to focus more
on tracking and rotoscoping for this demo to save time.
Just know that you can use Zap for lightning,
which is what you think of by default.
But you can also turn parameters on and off
for a more amograph look or something approaching ice.
Now that I have my desired look,
I can toggle the Mocha menu down and under bolts,
I can hit the users Mocha checkbox
to designate that the start and end points
will both use Mocha.
If I needed other points,
I would need to click Use Mocha
for every single point I needed.
Then I click Edit Mocha.
This will launch a new window.
We have an essential mode I already showed you for Mocha,
but in this case I'm going to use the Classic Mode
because I have a lot of complex tracking and roto
to do for this shot.
I can delete any unused trackers for points I do not need,
in this case everything but the start and end points.
I will then take my tracking search area shapes
and make them larger using the built in Transform tool.
Then I will take my points
and align them where I need them on this guy's hands.
If I want to change these points in my host,
I can always use the Mocha offset
in the plug-in interface.
We're going to track using translation only.
Now I hit track forwards.
In Mocha, it is normal to move the search area around
if you're tracking location moves off screen.
Sometimes retracting over an area like this,
back and forth, can help lock a tricky shot down
like this shot.
You can also smooth point tracks in the plug-in interface
if you have jitter but that's not needed here.
I recommend saving and closing Mocha,
and saving the project file at intervals.
Now we have to roto each of these fingers.
I am going to use the magnetic spline tool
to trace the fingers on each hand.
Notice how I'm grabbing areas that move similarly.
If he were bending his fingers a lot,
I would need to separate out shapes
by splitting the fingers at the joints.
But I only need to do fingertips
and the backs of the hands.
Right now I am focusing on fingertips.
Normally, I would say focus on tracking first
and then roto
but as you can see that's giving me limited results
because these fingers move a lot.
So my shapes don't really move as well with the fingers
as I would like.
That means we are going to have to track
and roto at the same time,
focusing on one finger at a time.
So I will show you how that looks
for this one pinky finger
and then I'm going to fast forward
through the rest of this roto.
We can use alt- or option-s and snap splines to the edges
of this finger or I can roto by moving points manually.
Mocha creates keyframes on top of my track
that reduce manual keyframing by up to two thirds
and can cut your roto time in half.
Notice how I am making keyframes
at the arcs of the animation
instead of every single frame.
This cuts down on roto jitter.
Try not to flip points.
Instead, keep the shape oriented in the same direction.
Points at the end of the finger should stay there
and not rotate around the finger for best results.
Okay, now that I have a pinky rotoscoped,
let's power through these other seven fingertips
and the backs of the hands.
I am not going to be too picky
about the backs of the hands
because they're essentially Garbage mattes.
But it is important that the finger roto
is decently accurate.
I can and will feather the matte in the plug-in interface
by using blur in Mocha,
but that will only hide so many of my sins.
Now we save and close Mocha.
I will check bypass Mocha off to use my mocha roto
and also, I will check invert Mocha
in order to hold the fingers out
instead of having the mask
the lightning inside those shapes.
We can add light leaks over the top
to match the colors of the lightning
and now we have a beautiful comp
with a really rad lightning effect
using Mocha parameter tracking.
So you can see with just a few clicks
and with the power of planar
and parameter tracking using Mocha inside of Sapphire 2020
you can really create some powerful effects
with minimal effort,
taking your visuals to the next level.
Mocha parameter tracking is available inside of LensFlare,
EdgeRays, Rays, Luna, Grunge, SpotLight,
Aurora, Zap, MuzzleFlash and FreeLens.
We'd love to hear your feedback.
So comment below and let us know
what other effects you'd like
to see us add Mocha parameter tracking to.
Thanks to Pickled TV footage, we really appreciate it.
To learn more about all the new features
and improvements in Sapphire 2020,
head over to BorisFX.com for more info.