One added surprise of the beta testing process was that users found PowerMesh incredibly useful for roto. To get to this point, Boris FX had a number of beta testers-mostly professional VFX artists-reviewing the tool. You can see in the videos above and below what the results with PowerMesh can be. “Our solution,” continues Shain, “was adding a smoothness control which allows the user to dial in the right amount of rigidity, and an auto mode where Mocha will try to find the right balance.” We had to find a way to overcome this while still allowing the mesh to deform as needed – which can vary from shot to shot.”

When the tracking areas get very small, it’s easy for errors to be introduced and parts of the mesh to deviate away from where they should be. With a non-planar surface, especially when the surface is deforming, each tiny area of the mesh needs to have its own motion calculation.

“This allows us to use all the pixel information in the entire area to calculate one consistent result, which can be extremely stable. So how does PowerMesh work, and what were the technical challenges in implementing a tool that could track warped surfaces? Shain says it goes back to how artists were already using Mocha’s planar tracker, including with the rigid planar constraint. With PowerMesh the same process is not only much faster but now artists can work on warp stabilized image for difficult paint and clean up shots.” “VFX artists already used Mocha Pro for face tracking and stabilization, for example, Pixel Magic famously did a lot of head replacements on the film Green Book. “Optical flow solutions can be slow and difficult to work with, so we took a different approach,” outlines Ross Shain, chief product officer at Boris FX, in relation to the development of PowerMesh.

Mocha pro 2021 powermesh