Miro Board Link:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/?share_link_id=371325218573
Once I had rendered the animation I started the compositing stage both in Nuke and in After Effects. Both had this colour issues with the beauty layers of the render layers.
The problem was related to the beauty and alpha channel that I had previously rendered separately. In After effects I have positioned the different layers in the following way to make it work: the physical sky ate the bottom followed by the beauty from the master layer and the alpha channel from the master layer. the beauty mode should be set to alpha matte in order for the alpha to mask the black background and show the physical sky beneath.
the picture here showcases the nuke viewport in this case the merge node was acting as screen mode so the opacity of the layers above would appear with a lower opacity. However if I first merged the alpha channel and the beauty layer from the the master layer first and after create an additional merge node connecting those two with the physical sky, they would appear normal.
This week I also created the intro for the short animation. I first created the illustrations and text using illustrator so that they would be vector drawing and the quality world be high, and after I have imported the different assets in after effects to animate them accordingly to the animatic.
In order to add a depth to the scene especially for the trees in the back ground I have done a research looking for a way to render a depth map in maya. One way of doing it is to ad the Z render pass in the render settings. Once the image is rendered it can be imported in after effects although it would first appear as completely white. Once an exposure and levels effects are applied to it it would show a greyscale of the rendered image with the darker values being those in the foreground and the lighter values behind those in the far back.
This is the depth map from the first scene. Although, as you can see, the difference of foreground and background is not that evident so once I have linked it to the beauty layer effect “camera blur” in after effect it would all appear as blurred in the same way and the foreground and the background would not be differentiated.
water reflection
Unfortunately the water in some shots I had previously rendered appeared with a weird reflection especially when the waves faced directly the sun which came across as unnatural. At first I thought that the physical sky might have caused it although I compared the scenes where this did not happen and the values for the physical sky were the the same. The difference was is the water shade and specifically the colour and the IOR values so I have set all the scenes with this problem using the following settings.
color correction
Once all the rendering were ready I started to composite each shot. Other than the alpha channel the beauty of the master layers I also overlaid the AO layer to it which gave a nice shadow effect to the items in the scene. to the beauty I have applied a hue and saturation and exposure effect to the ao a gamma effect.
clouds
While compositing I felt that the sky was a bit “empty” and that adding some clouds would add some depth as well to it. So I looked for some clouds obj on turbosquid By VARRRG and I found these which are a bit stylised and fit with with the overall style of the animation.