Compositing

Compositing:

For the compositing process, I decided to use After Effects. Although I had considered Nuke for this task, I ultimately dismissed the use of it due to my lack of knowledge in the program, whereas I am very familar with After Effects by comparison. 

I started by importing my rendered files as image sequences, changing the import setting to 'Footage'. 

From here, I was able to create a new composition at 24fps. I made two compositions, one for the main animation and the other for the 360 degree video, both in their respective resolutions. I also made sure to set the bit rate to 32 bits to ensure the maximum amount of quality whilst compositing. I started by setting up the render passes using the ExtratoR effect shown above. 

Once this effect is applied, you can select one of the various render passes for the layer to utilise. In order to do this properly, you need to duplicate the footage and set each layer of the footage to utilise a different render pass, and do so in the correct order. I started with the diffuse and worked through the list of passes. Keep in mind a few passes such as Variance are from the denoising AOVs and are not used for compositing, but would have been used by Maya to help denoise correctly. 

Moving on to the Shadow_Matte render pass, this is how it is rendered. I cannot say the reason why, but Maya renders this pass out with inverted black and white values. 

This is easily fixed by swapping the values of the Black point and White point, which is highlighted on the left of the above image. You may notice lots of lines in the sky in the image, this is a bug caused by the bilboards in the background which would have an edge around them that I nor my lecturers could figure out how to remove. Fortunately, these are barely visible when seen from the Beauty pass, especially with the use of fog in the scene. 

I continued to work through and implement all of the passes except for the Z pass, which will be utilised for depth of field later. Above demonstrates their order and mode they have been set to for them to operate correctly. For example, the shadow and AO passes are set to Multiply, whereas the others are set to Add. 

When these layers are set up, the result is pretty dark. This was easily fixed by adjusting the gamma by applying an Exposure effect to an adjustment layer at the top of the layers panel, and adjusting the Gamma Correction value from 1.00 to 2.43. This resulted in something more visible and easier to work with. Although the result is nice and bright, I may change this at a later time depending on how I feel with the visual result.

My next step was to implement some depth of field using the Z pass rendered earlier. However, Scene 3 involves a transition in the depth of field, focusing on both the warrior and knight between transitions. In order to achieve this, I would need to keyframe this. To make this a bit easier and organised, I split the composition into four new ones, one for each scene/camera shot. 

To set up the depth of field, I started by adding a new layer of the image sequence and adding the ExtratoR effect, setting it to the Z pass. I then adjusted the White point and Black point values to get a depth of field effect which would achieve what I wanted. In the above image I have adjusted the values so the warrior is completely unblurred, with my knight blurred in the distance. 

To utilise this, I created a new Adjustment Layer and added a Camera Lens Blur to the layer. I then used the Z pass shown earlier as the Blur Map, so the effect will operate based on the alpha values of the Z pass. This creates a nice blur effect to the distance. I did this same process for all scenes, one to four. 

In order to transition them, I first duplicated the Z pass from earlier and swapped the Black and White point values shown earlier, so the alpha would invert. Afterwoulds, I created a simple opacity keyframe so the first would fade out, and the other would fade in, creating a crossfade. Once this was achievd, I Pre-composed the layers and used this new pre-composed layer as the blur map instead, which contained the alpha values with the transition. 

Next, I wanted to add some refinement to the overall picture. After combining all of the scenes into a single composition, I added an Adjustment layer and applied a Vignette Lighting effect. 

Here is my image before the effect had been applied.

Here is the result after the effect has been applied. It causes a slight darkening of the edges as well as brightening the center, helping to create the disired effect of focusing the viewer towards the center of the video. 

After this, I added a Hue/Saturation effect. I enabled the colorize feature and shifted the values to blue, which created a saturation of blue across the entire image. To make this more subtle, I reduced the saturation of the effect and opacity, and then set the blending mode to Soft Light. This created a very subtle dark blue haze across the image. 

On top of this, I created a Curves effect and very slightly increased the blue value of the RGB values. This added a subtle blue tint to the image. Above is the result of these two effect in place. I wanted to give the video a more cold and depressing series of connotations to reinforce the story, but still kept this light to not overpower the overall details and quality in my character and environment designs. I felt that I found a good balance when adding this effect. 

At this point, I felt the compositing was complete. I did not feel that many other tweaks needed to be made, and that the overall image was pretty much complete. I started to render this out as an AVI footage to maintain as much quality as possible before moving on to editing and sound design. I did not want to use an .EXR sequence in Premiere as I had already been doing so in After Effects, and this was very tiresome to work with as each image took numerous seconds for each individual frame to load on its own, not including other effects and modifications made. 

From here, I moved on to Sound Design and Editing.