Dear Forumers,

I have a project where I need to have a face sing, which is made of smoke.

I have a short video of the artist singing shot on a black BG. Does anyone have any suggestions for a technique to use this footage to have her face singing, made of smoke?

Thanks,

5DN

this isn't trivial…
you could do a 2.5D effect
very basically you'll need to create geometry in the shape of your face ( you could try the trace SOP) or emit particles from the color of the video…that might get you somewhere
in 3D you'll need to build a head, rig it and animate it to closely match the performance…
once you have that you can turn the geometry into smoke…

do you have any reference for the kind of look you're going for?

I have no reference.

Definitely want to go for the emitting particles from the video color (which is b&w). How do you do that? And what other steps will be required?

there are tutorials on line about emitting from an image:
this should get you started
https://vimeo.com/25447365 [vimeo.com]
then use those particles do drive some smoke

look through ALL the tutorial here and on Peter Quint’s Vimeo site…
https://vimeo.com/user2030228/videos [vimeo.com]

thankyou.

these are old tutorials with the old particle setup. i wondering would it be good to have more particles emitted the whiter a pixel is in the image sequence? not quite sure how to set this up

I have not tried this, and my directions are vague, but I believe with some RD this would work…run the image through Nuke (or, can you do this in comp in Houdini?- I am sure you can, just never had the need) and calculate 2d motion vectors.

Create a grid and an attributeVop, use the image to drive an attribute (float) import texture - luminance- normalize - bindExport myEmisssion You can use tis to drive the emission of particles, as well as a bias for the scatter sop if you want to use that as an emission source.

Get the calculated 2d motion vectors, and use this to drive the initial velocity of the particles.

Add some drag and see what happens