Complex surface wrapping - 2D or 3D?

Hey guys,

Sorry for the confusing subject. What I want to do is wrap some video on a dancer's back, which will of course be moving (not too much though, as in not twirling around, just bending a bit from left to right). It should look like a tattoo or something growing from the base of the spine upwards. It should wrap around shoulderblades etc nicely. I'm a bit unsure on how to proceed with this:

1) One idea would be to have a 3D artist model the dancer's upper body, and then match moving it to the video. We can put some markers on the back, but we can't figure out a way to do it automatically, so it'll be likely a case for roto. Then it should be straightforward.

2) The other idea would be to do it in 2D: try to 2D track the markers, maybe try and track a collection of small planes say in mocha, and try to match a gridwarp to the video.

I should note that we don't have the budget to go to a mocap studio or anything like that, this is an indie dance film. Any ideas on what kind of method or workflow would yield a decent result? Any special considerations?

Thanks!

Draw a displacement map using her image as reference. Where black is back and white is fg.
Track that matte in/modify (roto) and use as a 3D displacement or 2D displacement for that matter.

I have done this many many many times for music videos and it works quite well.
There is also the grid warp, set the destination to her shape while leaving source a default grid.
Feed the image in and track the output warped image.

There can obviously be many more ways to skin this cat, but these steps are low budget with high return methods.

Thanks Rony, that's helpful.

Any thoughts on the best way to track it? We haven't shot it yet btw, if it matters.

ahhh.. well that's entirely different case then

I would most certainly use grid warp in this case, and some creative placements of markers on the dress will make all the difference. How much? imagine a shirt made of a grid, that's the best case scenario, work your way down from that until it's acceptable level of intrusion and/or paint out capabilities.

Thanks again!
Will try it as a test and see how well I can handle it.