The director wants to have 1 shot where an actor exits a car, but is made to look about 2 decades younger than he is. The actor in question is in his late 40s, and we have reference of him from 20 years ago.
The director has seen Tron and thinks doing a CG face replacement would be the way to go (as opposed to make-up or a younger double).
Im terrified as I know this is one of the hardest VFX things to achieve. Its for a TV production so wont have movie budgets, and as I said is for 1 shot so cant be a too complex.
I considered doing just 2D beauty work in comp, but its going to involve not only smoothing out his skin, but lifting jowls and a slight double shin using warping techniques, so this could get very complex.
My next instinct would be to do a 3D matchmove of the actors face on the plate, use a UV unwrap technique (similar to work I saw on Where The Wild Things Are) so that the texture of the face is all coming from the actual shot footage. Then do paint / beauty work on the unwrapped texture and reproject it onto a slightly facelifted version of the same 3D mesh.
The next option would be to create the face model / texture from scratch using reference photos, and try to matchmove / light it to match the scene. The actor is not going to be talking or anything – but he will climbing out of a car so there will be a decent amount of motion / lighting to get right.
The final option is getting a head scan of the actor and doing the same thing, but I think this is just going to get too expensive.
If anyone has experience of trying to achieve this then I would love some advice. I think doing beauty work on a female actor would be easier, but this guy certainly has the telltale signs of his age in the overall changing shape of his face and its texture.
Thanks in advance.
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