02/06/2011 - 15 Days left - Compositing

When it came to compositing I had a very simple method of achieving the look for the film. I had the 4 Basic passes set up with the Shadow Layer on top and the opacity down to about a quarter so that its really faint as this is meant to be a very sunny environment, I Ambient Occlusion (AO) on with multiply applied  so that I get just the nice shadows. I then have the colour at 50% opacity so the background layer behind bleeds through.

This is a character test render that i did about a week ago before I got the scenes to render you can see how the final image looks. the environment will have more depth to it this was just quick representation mock up.

Although this is the basic set up usually the scene have more that needs doing to them. A good example of this is Shot 12 as although the scene looked fine with the basic set up I wanted to add a motion blur to the trees as they pass the camera quickly but to do this I had to isolate the trees from the rest of the footage as I didn't want to blur anything else.

I had already started separating elements with my first render by having separate colour layers for the trees, characters and landscape. The difficult part of this was trying to separate the different areas on the Ambient Occlusion layer as otherwise i could end up with the occlusion effecting elements which it shouldn't be . As I had to create 2 small compositions within the main composition for each element I wanted to separate, each of these contained one AO layer and which ever element I was trying to isolate I would then use the element layer as a mask which I would the invert for the second layer.

 Here you can see an example of the a mask of the trees applied to the characters, its easy to spot on the man an if you look at the screenshot before hand. It was now that it was beginning to become more apparent that what the final shot was going to look like.

Here is the nearly finished shot although after looking at it, I decided that the main thing that wasn't looking right at the moment was the trees in the background as they were to sharp considering the speed that the camera was moving at. To add more depth involved adding more layers which involved going back to Maya.

In Maya setting up the trees for the layer was a pretty simple job of selecting them along with the lights and adding them to a new render layer and choosing batch render.

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Next it was a simple matter of repeating the process for blurring the trees earlier although this time I had less blur as the trees were further away from the camera.

 

1st shot done today


2nd shot done today