Here Ends My Second Year!

So the hand in of my final project also marks the end of my second year. This means that next year is my final year, which will also be one of the biggest years of my life to date. I will continue blogging over the summer holidays when I start to do research for my client and research projects next year. I look forward to next year even though I know it will be a busy.

Overall I am pleased with the year just gone and I look forward to finding this years overall mark. I feel I have developed my skills greatly in a variety of softwares including 3DS Max, Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator and of course After Effects. I suppose there is only one thing left to say now and that is bring on next year.

Compositing Project - Analysis Of The Production Process

The final project of my second year was ‘compositing’ and it was given in two parts. The first part I had to take my chrome character from a previous project and place it within a real life image. The character had to walk behind an obstacle such as a tree or a coffee mug as if it was always meant to be there. The scene had to also contain matched aspects of light, shadows, reflections, colour tone/grain and masking. The second part to the project was to piece together a composition from the different elements given to me and then apply at least four different creative effects within Adobe After Effects.

I learnt throughout this project that compositing is vital stage at the end of the design process as it allows you to easily manipulate how the overall animation or film looks. This can be from adding simple creative effects such as noise, colour changes, blurs, distortion or editing, adding or removing elements within the scene. I found to be useful when compositing both parts of the project as it allowed me to change the overall look without spending hours rendering over and over again within 3DS Max. I found that rendering the different elements separately and then layering them within Adobe After Effects is a valuable method to editing any scene as it saves time on rendering which is important when producing a project quickly and effectively for a client.

I also found that you can apply different effects to the different layers easily such as the ‘glow’ I used on the window’s, in part two, to emphasise the effect of light shining through them. The other effects I used were a ‘fast blur’ on the cars and the trail to give them more motion. I used some noise on the billboards to give the effect of a pixelated screen.

Compositing is a useful skill to have when producing animations simply for the main reason of time saving, especially if a client chooses to change something they aren’t happy with or want to add of change something e.g. a logo or colour. 

Overall, I enjoyed this project, I learnt many new skills one of which is learning more about Adobe After Effects and working with that software. It is a useful tool for an animator and I can see how it could be utilised for special effects within the film industry, something I am hoping to explore in the near future.  I would like to extend my knowledge further in Compositing as I feel that it would be a very useful skill to have and would leave me with a larger work opportunity in the future. It is now something I am considering to pursue, as I never thought I would of enjoyed it as much as I did. I’m sure I have only just touched the surface of compositing and therefore I would like to go further in depth and find out more on how to composite different scenes. As the technology improves the possibilities of merging an animated world and the real World seem endless. Having now reached the end of second year and going into my final year I will be working on and thinking about where my future lies and this project on ‘compositing’ has definitely open a new door for me.

Part 1 - Final Compositing Animation

Part 2 - Final Compositing Project

Below is the final second part of my project, I have added four different effects including, fast blur, glows, noise, colour change and hue and saturation. I put all the elements together in the correct layer order and this is my final outcome.

Part 1 - Second Render

I sorted the shadows out, they could do with being a littler darker too, to match the shadows already within the scene, I still need to change the character to chrome. I'm thinking of starting this project again so I can improve the final result.

Part 2 - Compositing Test

Compositing test, piecing together animation using lectureres files, making it easier to edit later on if necessary. No effects have been added as of yet.

Part 1 - First Render

The first render of part 1 of my compositing project shows my character walking behing the mug. However the shadows are very rough so I am going to change them for a ray traced shadow to make them sharper. I also need to change the character to chrome so that the room is reflected within the character to reflect the scene.

Compositing Project: Brief

1. Composite a Chrome Character into a photo or video. Using a previously created character (from Andy's Bots & Bananas) Animation of the character will be left to your imagination, however it must involve some part of passing behind a real world object. Render and composite, in After Effects, a 125 frame sequence of your character within your 'real' environment. Render elements must be in 16bit .exr format with the final output as a quicktime h.264. The scene/shot must comprise of at least 2 surfaces [ground & vertical] and 1 real world obstacle [eg mug/tree]. It must contain matched aspects of light, shadows, reflections, colour, tone/grain, masking 

2. Piece together a composition from given elements and apply at least 4 creative effects . Analyse the production project and write a 500-1000 words article focusing on the production pipeline used and justifying each aspect of the provided 'render elements' and your methods of composition.