Thursday, May 8, 2008

A few words on rendering and comp

Well everybody, my film is done, and as such I will talk a little about the rendering process I had to go through in order to get it done.
Basically as I have said before I used a Mental Ray / sotware renderer pipeline. Most of the clouds and atmospheres were done with Mental Ray while the backgrounds and paint effects were done with Maya software renderer. The workflow with each is pretty similar, and since with fluid effects there really is no reflection / refractions, shadows, etc. I pretty much rendered only one beauty pass for the clouds and that is what i worked with and adjusted in comp. As I mentioned before the paint effects pipeline is also one pass in which you must mix all the paint effects you want together since you wont be able to combine them afterwards so in theory my comp work was pretty simple, having only a couple of layers to work with. However on some occasions such as the space scene with the moving clouds I rendered each cloud element separately so I would be able to combine them and adjust them individually.

Most of the comp work focused on making things look good, stuff like color correction, cool effects and blurring things to make them look more integrated into the scene. This was the case especially with the particles at the beginning and the clouds when you can see the horizon, blurring them towards their horizon line helps establish a sense of depth.
Other than that it was pretty much business as and thankfully my comp work didn't give me much problems.

Although the resolution of the images here is really low I will try to show you what the image looks like before and after i have done compositing work on it.




Here what I have done is mainly color correction, some blur on the clouds and color on the background, so although its a suibtle change it does add up and when you add movement plus a high resolution the difference is clear and its crucial.

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