Water dress CGI

The tracking and compositing can be done with After Effects basic tools. You'll need some 3rd Party software to do the 3D simulation. Each shot in your project would be a separate comp because things like this get extremely complicated very quickly. The most important part of a visual effect like creating a water dress is the planning and testing required to pull it off without endless experimentation in post. You can't just get an actor and a camera and shoot whatever happens in front of the camera and expect to be able to pull off the visual effect by throwing a few plug-ins at the shot.

Things to consider and plan for and test before you shoot the actual shots include:

• sufficient fixed geometry in the shot to make 3D camera tracking accurate
• some way to effectively track the movement of the actor's body so you can get an accurate track of the movement of the body including the head, shoulders arms, chest, waist, hips, legs, and feet and generate some kind of rig to make the dress move
• some way to record the lighting in the scene and capture a reflection map
• some way to make isolating the actor's arms from the body so Roto is minimized
• a convenient way to separate the actor from the background so roto is minimized
• some way to capture a 3D model of the set so the fluid in the effect will have something to bounce off
• probably a dozen or so other minute details that pop up as you block the actor and the camera movement

Third party software or effects plugins that you will have to purchase

1. some kind of fluid simulation or particle system to generate the water
2. some kind of 3D system that will allow you to add texture and reflections to the water simulation
3. some kind of rigging system so you can create a character rig for the actor that you can apply to the water dress
4. possibly some enhanced 3D tracking software like Syntheyes

If you are on a budget and you plan carefully enough a combination of Blender (open source and free 3D app) and After Effects can get the job done. If you have a budget you can work with then something Video Copilot's Element 3D and Trapcode Particular, Mir and/or Tao could pull off this kind of effect if you keep the shots simple enough. Mocha Pro, Syntheyes, Real Flow, 3DS Max or C4D and several months of study and testing would get you to the point where you could pull off something truly amazing where the water interacted not only with the actor but the environment.

If you carefully watch the video you can see that the water simulation never really interacts with the environment. The fluid simulation just sticks to the actor, her limbs are rotoscoped to get them in front of the water, and foreground elements are also separated.

I've outlined the roto work done in this shot. The shots are all very short, most have little or no camera movement, what camera movement there is is very smooth. If this were a big budget feature then the visual effect would be about at the proof of concept stage. The final polish would be to make the fluid interract with the rest of the environment.