Home Stretch

With only four days left until our short film is to be presented, the finish line is finally in sight. Our new environment proved to be exactly what we needed: our render times have dropped down drastically and now fit within our limits, and the environment itself has come together as a cohesive whole.

With every portion of our animation either rendered or currently rendering, we are taking this opportunity to work with completed renders in After Effects. As mentioned earlier in our process, we could not simply render out a sequence of frames and then place each frame together in a sequence; each frame of our completed animation consists of many "plates" which contain individual partitions of the final frame, separated at render time and then re-assembled in a stage known as "compositing".

To begin compositing our animation, there are many steps that must be taken. Some of these were taken as early as setting up the renders, requiring us to render out depth passes of our plates alongside the actual image. These depth passes use a range of values from 0-255 to indicate the distance between surfaces and the camera. These values are useful for determining whether an object is in front of or behind another object, as well as establishing depth-of-field effects such as lens blur. We used depth maps extensively to aid in the construction of our scenes.

From here, we can begin editing the components themselves, and enhancing the scene overall. Because each component is contained within a plate, we can modify the footage for that component separately from the rest, or we can apply adjustments to the entire scene. Most of our time at this stage is spent adjusting the lighting.

Another step taken at the rendering stage to aid in compositing was the preparation of a fog plate. This is a sequence which captures the output of a volumetric shader applied to our entire environment set to move and behave much like fog would. This plate is used to give the scene more atmospheric colour and give depth to the environment.

From this stage, a few final adjustments are made and the scene is rendered out of After Effects to be used in the final product. Initial compositing work goes fairly slow, as it takes time to find which adjustments need to be made and in what order they should be made, but once we get one scene looking just right, we simply need to apply the same techniques throughout our animation.