AkemiExpansions

Most of you probably know of Akemi Expansions (or on DeviantArt) or at least seen something made by them. They're one of the few people currently making real life breast expansion content. If that wasn't cool enough, the rigs they're using are pretty amazing! I'm not trying to fangirl or anything, but I've liked everything I've seen from them. I liked two clips in particular, so I added my own effects:

• Source: Hasna and Candii from AkemiExpansions

I posted these to reddit in the comment sections to when /u/thatsambell posted the originals, the first one yesterday and the magic wand one quite a while ago.

Besides posting them here, I wanted to specifically talk about how I did the first one so quickly (compared to what I normally do anyway) since it only took about 3 hours.

I think everybody can see what makes the original so nice, but the second thing I noticed was that her shirt is very bright pink. Why is that nice? Keying. It's basically a green screen, but in reverse. I've not had the opportunity to work on something like this, so I was excited.
The first challenge was how to actually key using after effects... I've never done it. I settled on the Color Range effect and Key Cleaner:

Obviously, it's backwards, but it's currently what most people think of when they see "greenscreen". But an Invert effect on the alpha channel makes it more like what I wanted:

At this point I knew we were in business. The only problem remaining was that the bottom of the shirt was also being grabbed and can't be keyed out, so that part had to be manually rotoscoped out with a mask. It goes quicker than you think if you chunk it out by frames where it's similar, then fill in the movement afterwards.

While I was happy, the key needed to be smoother, so I basically just tried all the effects in the Key & Matte menus until I found some that worked: Refine Hard Matte, Refine Soft Matte:

The first is before any refinement, the second is after the Refine Hard Matte, the third is after the masking to get rid of the bottom of the shirt and adding the Refine Soft Matte. You can see the whole shape is much smoother.

On to the expansion - I chose to use Re:flex warp instead of the standard reshape effect because I didn't want to stretch the hair area. Reflex allows me to set a mask and lock it (it's the weird v shaped ones - there's actually two there.)

Here's where I want to point out why I think one of the greatest things I've made is actually the UberKey tool in the jiggle and grow script. In order to make the expansion mask (the red one) I would have to re-keyframe every single one of those frames I made earlier by hand and try to keep them all even with the same movement. Not going to happen. The UberKey script saved me, make one adjustment and let it fly; boom, done. You might also notice the shape starts get a bit pulled out in the lower left, that's because the shape of the breast is still one of that being cupped, so I had to make an adjustment to the shape over time so that it looks like it's falling out.

After that it was about adding a bit of a shadow and color correcting a bit.
I know it's stupid to get excited about seeing breast jiggling and think, oh yea, I could key that without much rotoscoping, but here we are. Normally video is a pain because you spend hours moving those masks around every frame, but with this one... nope.

While it isn't perfect, some frames do indeed look bad, I think it's pretty good - especially for a first time keying anything. Much thanks to AkemiExpansions and to Hasna and Candii for being cool about all this.