New Web Site

As part of my degree, which has just over a week of work left now, I have updated my website and show reel! It's all a bit empty at the moment, but I am thinking it will be one I can build on with more ease than the old one.
Have a look here and I hope you like it!

The Making Of Project Dragon - Episode 13

Finishing Touches

All the animations are done. All the simulations are complete. All the renders are finished. The only thing left to do is to bring all the elements together. To do that I worked in Composite, a node based compositing package from Autodesk. It also happens to be very handy with the OpenEXR files.

To give you an idea of how I worked, take a look at the image below (you may want to get the full size image to read the text):

(Click to embiggen)

Starting with the Beauty in the top left cluster, I piped in the Diffuse to enable me to alter the colour without effecting the shading. The CC Basics node give me access to HSV settings to tweak this look. It is worth noting that if there was a lot wrong with the look of the grass in the beauty, I had all the passes required to alter any desired element within the image of the grass. 

I then blended a blurred Specular pass to add a little glow and softeneing to the layer. This was then comped into a Remap Colour node. This node, and the fact that I had rendered in 32 bit images, was a life saver at this point. In the footage, the camera starts behind a hill, without direct sunlight. As the camera goes over the hill and the light increases, the exposure of the shot changes. This meant I had to key the exposure of the grass layer to match the background plate; a feat I could not have accomplished nearly as well with 8 or 16 bit images.

This footage is then piped into a blur node. This is where I added motion blur to layer. The Motion Vector layer doesn't contain an alpha, but an alpha is required to add motion blur effectively, so a Set Alpha was used to pull an alpha from the Beauty to the Motion Vector.

This blurred layer is then piped into the main bulk of the composition. This process was followed for all the C.G. layers within the comp. Below you can see an image of the full network:

(Click to embiggen)

The last final effects I added was a Vignette and a colour grading. I wanted to make the scene a bit hotter, so made the shot redder, as well as tweaking the contrast.

This pretty much brings me to the end of the production of this shot. It has been a slog and slightly torturous, but I am pleased with the final effect. Until next time. 

Alex

(Click to embiggen)