FXPHD – NUK310 – The Dark Art of Digital Beauty Work

This advanced course looks at the techniques used to improve the physical appearance of on-screen talent; techniques which are useful on almost every single project. Prof Nathaniel Westveer will be sharing production-proven approaches for creating seamless digital beauty, which is a mash up of various practices sometimes referred to as digital beauty work, digital cosmetics, and digital beauty retouching.
Westveer, having broken into this secret world as an fxphd member years ago, returns to share his knowledge with the community, bringing light to a dark art. He brings experience of having worked on 60+ music videos featuring a large range of Hollywood legends and icons, including Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Beyonce and more.
course syllabus
Class 1: Introduction. Painting, grading techniques, and working procedurally to get the job done. A deep look at Nuke's Paint node, as well as the Open Spline tool, with an abstract of how the process would work on other platforms.
Class 2: General facial beauty, and the anatomy of what we aim to achieve. How different regions of the face behave differently throughout the plate. How to clean up blemishes around an area that dramatically shifts and changes, such as around the mouth. Also, how to clean up around the forehead and addressing under eyes while keeping the contour and convexity of it in tact.
Class 3: Body Sculpting/Painting. Defining Silhouette vs Inner Body Modifications, with a look at different warping methods, including Spline and Grid Warp. Creating clean plates, but also discussing techniques to acceptably warp without a clean plate when time is tight. Also addressing common body modifications such as double chin, bra bulge, torso rolls, muffin tops, and hourglass sculpting requests.
Class 4: Hair. In this class we'll dive into one of the most difficult issue a Beauty artist will face: frizzy flyways. We'll look at addressing the issue by hand and go into a crash course in Mocha which includes creating masks for your trackers, being mindful of how your planar surface shifts through out the track, and linking tracks to create subtraction splines.
Class 5: Shifting surfaces. We'll dive into how to address shots where your offset/clone sources doesn't match your target through out the shot with 2D and 3D solutions within Nuke. For 2D, stabilizing the plate and adding reverse stabilization are critical , while at the same watching out for issues like aliasing (and what you can do to avoid it).
Class 6: Lens flares and flashing lights. How to do beauty in the most hostile lighting environments.
Class 7: Project Workshop. Applying what you've learned in the first part of the course to various projects.
Class 8: Facial symmetry.
Class 9: Project Workshop. Applying what you've learned in the first part of the course to various projects.
Class 10: Project Workshop. Applying what you've learned in the first part of the course to various projects.