2.5 Creating and Lighting the Ceiling

Hello, this is Christopher Kemworthy, and welcome again to the visual effects compositing course. You've put in a texture over this doorway, and now we need to really clean up all the other textures, and make everything look right. At the moment the ceiling still doesn't look appropriate for this, and doesn't blend in. And this wall on the left isn't right at all either. Also, we've switched off our sign, which we should switch back on and there that is. So before we start adding elements such as the grate that falls down, we really wanna get this looking as good as possible. I quite like the way that the texture on the right wall works here. It blends in over the real wall effectively. But this wall on the left is a little more problematic. We can't make it transparent because if we do, then the side of the corridor shows through, and it just looks wrong for this particular setting. Although, we can color correct it, I still think it's not going to blend in that well, specially when we add in the sign from Cinema 4D. So I think in fact what I'm going to do is render this left wall and the sign and the ceiling in Cinema 4D. Keeping just the right hand wall and the door frame layer in after effects. So let's go back to Cinema 4D, Edit Original. I'm going to make the left wall visible over here, and to create a ceiling I'm just going to duplicate the left wall, so I copy and paste and to rename this ceiling. Just drag it on to the corridor. So, we have our ceiling, and all I want to do is hit the red rotation there, to ninety degrees. And then, I'm going to select the move tool and just move this up until it's in line with the top of the layer on the left, just there. And move it across. Now, I need to light this a little better, so I'll probably select our light, and just move that down in 3D space, there we can see it. Now, let's give this ceiling a different texture. I'm just going to apply the right wall texture to it, and see how that looks. I'll save, go back to after effects, and now, to check this I'm going to switch from the software renderer to standard final. And we can see there that's starting to look okay. But I'm not particularly happy with the light. So I'm gonna go back to Cinema 4D. The great thing here is any changes you want to make you can just come straight back into Cinema 4D and make them. You don't have to render everything out of Cinema 4D and then start worrying about what went wrong. So, the light selected, I'm just going to go down to Specular and switch that off. Save, go back to After Effects, and that's looking a lot better, all ready. And I'm going to need to mask this layer to see how it fits in. First of all, I'm just noticing that this is bothering me, here. So, I'm gonna go back to Cinema 4D. Just switch the visibility of the track solid off there. Back in After Effects, we now have a clear view of what's going on. So now select the tunnel layer, and select the pen tool, and I'm just going to draw a mask around the doorway, just for this frame, so that I can see how everything's looking. And although the colors are still not right, I think that's starting to look quite impressive. So I might work with the colors a little now. So I'll go into Cinema 4D. The light is still selected. And down here I can either adjust the sliders to get a bluish light, or I can click on this box and select something that way. I think I'll just use these sliders. I'll push the blue up, pull the red and the green down, save that, have a look at that in After Effects. That's blending a lot better. It's still not right but it will certainly do for the work that we're doing now. And you can see that because I've positioned that light in Cinema 4D down around here, it's glowing pleasantly on the walls in a way that matches down here for the layer on the right. However, I want to extend that ceiling off into the distance, so I'll go back to Cinema 4D, select the ceiling layer, and just select this little orange dot there, and drag the scale up. Then I'll select the orange dot over here and widen it. And save, and we can see that ceiling now disappearing off into the distance. I might want to make that go even further so that it blends in with the very dark part of the image back here. So I'll just go back to cinema 4D, extend it even further. If I need to widen it I can. Just click on the scale tool here and grab this green cube and drag that out to the side. Save, back to After Effects and now that ceiling layer is really disappearing off into the distance. There is an area up here where I want to see the door frame, and I'm gonna need to do some more masking. So I'll select the pen tool, draw a very rough mask around here, which I can then adjust once I can see what's going on. Just hit m, change the color of this mask to cyan, and change the mask to intersect, and invert it. Now I can just zoom in and I can see now where to position these points. And over here we just need to line up with this wall. Now when I pull out, you can see that the ceiling disappears into the background and we can still see the corridor there. Obviously we need to draw another mask around this right hand side of the ceiling. So making sure I have the tunnel layer selected, I just draw approximately what I want to get rid of, and then see how it looks. Change this third mask to subtract, and just change the mask color again. I will go back to Cinema 4D and just and get this lighting to look a little more interesting, so I'm going to just push the green up a little, see how that looks. I could if I wanted add light in after effects but I'm quite interested in seeing what I could achieve here. I'll even experiment with dropping in a spot light as well. I'll move that down, and across and you can get great results by mixing light and changing their settings, so when I've got the light here I can come down to intensity. Drag that right down, change it's color, make that blue. Maybe push the intensity up a bit now that I've done that, render that. And you'll find after a while, that you want to start adding lots of different lights, and mixing them and changing their intensities. I think I would prefer the light to actually hit this ceiling, as well. So I'm just going to, I'm going to get the rotation tools again, rotate it up, render that, and that's looking more interesting. Go back to After Effects, and you can see now we're getting a much more rich and textured look to the light. This isn't gonna be the final version. I'm gonna want to go in later and do lots more to the lighting, but that's a good initial look. However, one thing that's missing is the trap door, and we are going to need to see that all the way through. Although I've talked about masking out the trap door, I think it might be worth trying an alternative approach here, where we use the Roto Brush. So I'm just gonna drop another copy of the corridor layer in. I'm going to rename it Trap Door, and I'm gonna select the Roto Brush, double click on the layer and then just draw inside the space. That's selected automatically. You can see this very light gray bar here is the Rotorush span. Just drag that right to the far right. And then, because this is a really easy area to select, you can probably just move right to the end here, and wait for the little green line to here to propagate all the way to the end. And when it does, you should have a perfectly matted trap door. And then when that reaches the end, just check that it still look accurate. It looks fine, and I click freeze. It will now do some more calculations and just freeze that all in to place. Freezing the layer means that this mask is locked in, and it doesn't have to recalculate it each time you move through it. So, it's important to freeze it before moving on. So we go back to the composition window, and that looks very good. All the way through, just click in a few random spots. And there we have a beautifully masked trap door. Just switch on the tunnel layer. Actually having done that, I think that edge does need a bit of work because you can see some of the surrounding roof on there. So I'm just gonna change the feather to 15 and that's much softer. And I like that. And there we have a trap door layer which I'll drag down in the timeline until it's just above the tunnel layer here. And that saved us having to do a lot of masking. Course, before you move on, you do need to mask off the other areas. I can just delete that yellow mask, Mask 4, which is for the trap door. But these other masks need to be animated all the way through. And when they are, you're ready to go to the next stage.