Not anymore: Mocha Pro 2021 introduces a new tracking technology called PowerMesh. It’s limitation was that each section of the face needed to have its own cornerpin track to account for the non-coplanar motion of the various facial muscles. Mocha has always been the “go to” tool for post-production cosmetic surgery (at least for 2D effects).

The next step was to take the source footage into Mocha Pro 2021 for tracking. I’m guessing outlier ages wouldn’t work so well, since it’s unlikely that Adobe had a lot of centenarians with quality photos of their teenage selves to work with. I don’t know if there’s any significance to the slide numbers or range, but cranking it to 50 worked well for my purposes. Photoshop detects the face and applies the aging. I feel like I should write more about the process, but that’s really it. The details-creases along the jowls, puffiness in the eyes, fuller face-are representative of what might actually occur as someone ages. The filter has been trained (I’m guessing) on hundreds of actual photographs of the same people at different ages for ground truth. This isn’t some cheesy “add creases to forehead” approach. I simply cranked the aging slider up to 50, and…bam! My actor 30-ish years later. I loaded a representative frame from the shot sequence into Photoshop as an EXR. The first step is to use Adobe Photoshop’s new Neural Filter to age the actor. Now there’s additional clean-up required to fully nail the shot (yellowing the teeth and eyes, dulling the irises, adding more creasing to the neck), but right out of the gate this method produced believable results.

It ended with what I consider to be a viable recipe for realistic aging. This began as an exercise to see just how far I could push both the Adobe aging effect and the new Mocha Pro PowerMesh for production-level work. Read on to find out how, or watch our free step-by-step guide video in. Thanks to Adobe’s machine learning technology Sensei and the latest version of Boris FX’s Mocha Pro 2021, you can roll your own aging effect in about a half hour of setup time. The solution has been to turn to VFX wizardry made popular by studios like Lola Visual Effects.

When practical effects are used, they’re often erased and replaced in post because the defects show up on the 4K screen. In the age of 4K and beyond, it’s very hard to convincingly make an actor look old using practical prosthetics and make-up.

Mocha power mesh