The definitive answer is: It Depends! I generally stabilize for the glasses (doing a planar track for the frames of the glasses and the areas of skin around usually works) and then once you have it stabilized you can paint/comp in over the areas that you need to remove. I’m guessing a desert environment reflection would be relatively easy to build up a fake environment to pan around in to create your fake reflections. For me, the key thing is to leave as much of the practical reflection as possible.
I’ve never had to do a complete replacement before but I’ve thought before that if I had to, I’d find an IBL that looks like the environment, use Map Convert to flatten it and comp in the elements you need reflected and then use the resulting latlong to texture a sphere in Action for your reflections, which you then reflect onto lenses you create with 3D shape. But it’s not something I actually tried so I can’t say for certain it would work. It would be a lot of work, for sure.
@Ben had to a bunch these a little while ago and pretty straight forward once you get one of them working. first would be to do a 3d perspective track. expand out a matte of each lens bigger than the glass, blur the matte and multiply that back over the original matte so you’re left with a gradient on the shape. in action attach a black coloured source to the perspective track, hang the hdri off as a reflection and the gradient lens matte as a displacement. will need a bit of fiddling to get them to play nicely but main thing is increasing the Z and softness on the displacement, and the amount of blur of the matte and how much its been made bigger. this is basically dictating how curved the glass is. can get more detailed with the shape using to dispace by adding hard white edges for example. then screen that back over your front using the matte you made earlier
I actually did a slightly different method before o read this where I projected the reflection on to a curved surface, did a CC and a few keyframes to match the horizon level in the original.
I then used a pixel spread to stretch the result lens, this gave a fear in loathing style effect which really helped with the distortion of the BG and a that tiny bit of extra curve to sell the lens.
The only problem i have is I could to with a little bit of extra shine to the lens but its looking pretty go so far. Going to have a go at what you guys suggested now.