Going Live: Dragon Transformation

I've been avoiding this effect for a little while as I wasn't 100% sure what would be possible given the time we have left. It worked out rather well though!

I started off by using the ID matte for the tree to mask out the eagle leaving only it's ambient occlusion pass, the tree then expands to fill the entire frame with blackness as the eagle begins to desintegrate and the dragon materialises around it. 

It's a similar effect to the one I developed for Ticked Off, but it looks pretty slick and is relatively painless.

Going Live: Shot 02 Composite

I've spent a LONG time wrestling with the passes for shot 02, the main issue is trying to get the shadows for the town to soften accurately, while retaining a stylistically sharp shadow for the dragons which are high above the landscape. If rendered accurately the dragon shadow would be extremely blurred due to the penumbra softening the edges.

I eventually managed to render out two seperate shadow passes and composite them together to achieve the desired effect.

I then precomosed this shadow pass and treated it like a single shadow pass to composite with the rest of this shot. I've still got a lot more to do on this shot, particularly at the end when the ground burns away to reveal shot 03, but at least this problem is solved!

Going Live: First Finished Frame!!!

Going Live: Final Paper Shader.

I've finished tweaking the paper shaders and textures for the dragon, really pleased with the look. I could have spent a lot longer messing around with it but I need to move on to finalising the compositing!

I thought it would be cool to add in a glowing fire from inside the dragon to really show off the translucency of the materials. I achieved this by parenting a light to one of the joints inside which I will render out as an individual pass allowing me to toggle/flicker it when he breathes fire.

Going Live: Latest compositing test.

I've been messing around more with the compositing and it's really starting to take shape. The textures, rigging and animaiton are all coming along nicely so I've got plenty to play with. I also applied the normal maps to the textures and it's working very well. 

I've added some camera effects such as grain, bokeh, chromatic abberation and flares to try and remove it from the overly CG look and it's getting there... definitely needs more work though.

Polygon Boots Final Render

So my boot project is finished, and I'm very happy with the results. The lighting, rendering and compositing took a lot of fiddling around but I got there in the end. 

The model topology (which has since been refined slightly) is viewable here.

The initial texturing and shading (which has also been refined slightly) is viewable here.

There's a screenshot of my Maya setup below, showing the outliner, render layers and boot topology. 

The lights were just a basic 3 point lighting rig, all with physically correct attributes, but with pure white colour in order to avoid any additional gamma correction. As for render passes, I rendered everything in full 16/32bit .EXR files with full Linear workflow to get the most flexibility in compositing. 

The render layer/pass setup is listed below:

- Rim light

     - Diffuse 

     - Specular

- Fill Light

     - Diffuse

     - Specular

- Key Light

     - Diffuse

     - Specular

- Ambient Occlusion

- Master Layer

     - Depth

     - Indirect

     - Master Beauty 

I imported all the .EXR files into NukeX for compositing, manipulating almost all of the sections slightly. Obvious changes include camera blur, lighting tweaks and colour correction.  Here's a screencap of my node tree:

Finally, below is the final output. It's a shame we weren't givent the opportunity to track/composite the project into a live action shot as intended, as those are my primary interests on the course. However it did give me the chance to have a quick run through of most production roles in the pipeline. 

Tutorial - Compositing in After Effects - 1: Importing, Compositions, Layer Setup

Salutations droogs!

As I've mentioned previously, it's my plan to start making some simple tutorial videos focused around compositing specifically for animation in Adobe After Effects. This is the first of several, so I've got a few things to get out of the way before we get stuck in. 

Firstly, I've got no idea what kind of stage to begin at. After asking around a little and getting some advice I figured the best place to begin would be the start... so with that said, some people might find the first video pretty useless. I'm going to chat a little about passes, layers, importing and setting up a comp, before moving on to setting up all the layers in my new comp. If you're already comfortable with all of that then you'll probably be more interested in the next one where I'll show what you can do to pimp them out. 

Secondly, I've never really done anything like this, and I know I've got a tendency to ramble, side track, and not finish sentences... so I'm sorry if anything isn't quite as clear as I hope. If folk have any questions I'm pretty easy to get a hold of. 

I don't know everything about After Effects. Pretty much everything I know was just sort of figured out over the course of a couple of years. There could very well be much more efficient and successful ways of solving these problems, but I hope everybody will be able to at least take away something from this. I just want to try and get people thinking about what you can achieve with compositing, which I feel is something that wasn't really explained to me during my time at uni. 

I'm not going to be looking at anything to do with Nuke, for two reasons; unless you want to be a compositor in the industry or are working with live action plates, it's unnecessary. Secondly, I can't use Nuke for shit. 

I'm also not going to be covering anything on the maya rendering side of things. For a few reasons; I knew what frames I required for comp, but my good friend/saviour/wizard Finlay handled all of the actual rendering so, to be honest, I don't feel confident in my rendering knowledge to put it in the videos. Also, there's plenty of better resources where you can find that sort of information.

Finally, I'm going to be using assets from our degree film Ticked Off for most of the compositing examples. Mainly because I've got all the frames, but also because it's something that myself and most of you guys will be familiar with.  

I think that's pretty much everything, check out the video below. I'd love to hear any feedback both good and bad, and I'm not just saying that. 

Happy comping!

D'Ark Compositing Breakdown & Updates

Salutations!

As some of you know, I'm doing a lot of compositing on D'Ark at the moment, this was the first test composite to finalise the look that Jamie was after. I decided to make a breakdown of it tonight to share with you guys.

I went for a different approach with this breakdown from the previous Lava one, by having the passes unmask on top of each other... you can tell me whether it's successful or not :)

As for the numbers, this one was originally at 1080p with about 25 layers, but I had to reduce the size and pre compose a lot of the elements to try and reduce the render time and stop my laptop from biting my face off. 

Finally, I highly recommend watching it in full HD on youtube here, but for those of you too lazy I've embedded it below. 

In other news, WE'RE ALMOST FINISHED 3RD YEAR. Huzzah! Soon there'll be cider, BBQs and sunshine aplenty and I can't wait.

Our final hand ins are tomorrow and we're all pretty well prepared for a change. We also got out sexy production bible printed out, I'll upload a digital copy in due course.

Here's to 4th year :D