4.7 Final Compositing

Hello, this is Christopher Kenworthy and welcome to the Visual Effects Compositing course. And we've done an awful lot of work now but it's time to really change the final look, get that final look by lighting everything properly. I'm going to turn off the visibility of most of the layers. Just click off, make sure my camera is selected. Then I'm going to work on this tunnel layer first. Put my corridor dark in the background, and I may as well add my right wall and door texture, so I that can see the basic set up there. Select the tunnel layer and go to Edit > Edit Original. One thing that you'll find is that you create something like this and it looks good. You like the way it looks. But when you come to look at your actual composition in After Effects you're not so happy with the way the colors blend. And it all looks a little too bright. So although we did a lot of work along the way, we might actually throw some of that work out now to create something that's a bit darker and more relevant to the shot as a whole. I'm going to start by working with this wall texture. So I'll select the left wall. Now I'm going to select its texture down here and just make some changes to that. First of all, I'm going to set it to have a bump map, so down here I'll click Bump. And then I'll select a texture from here. I'll go to Surfaces and just pick Pavement. Now when I render, we might see, we can see there are now cracks and details in that wall. I quite like that but I have to save and go to After Effects to see how it's gonna look in the final composition. I am happy with that. So I'll look at the ceiling layer, it was textured with the right wall texture. So I'm going to double click that, I'll give this a bump map, too. And select texture surfaces and I'll go with rust. And you can see that bump map's just made slight differences here, but I'm gonna turn up the strength here by dragging, and make that a little bumpier like that. Now when I render, you can see there's a lot more detail in that ceiling. Now we'll look at our light. So maybe we'll move it to a different position. I'm gonna move it right down, then render. And I'm still not happy with that, it's looking a little too boring. So I'm actually just going to delete these lights and just start again. So I'm gonna go up here, create a new light, drag that down here. Gonna color it by hitting the color box and choosing something blue. And I'm just gonna save that and have a look at that in After Effects. And although that's very dark and quite purple, probably a bit too purple for our tastes, I'm preferring that. I think that's a better look to anything we've had so far. It is much darker, but I think that's going to work better. I'm just gonna take some of the purple out of that, push up the green a little here. Maybe lessen the blue. Save that. Just give that a quick render, see how that's looking. Not bad at all. But I don't like the way the light's sitting on this surface here, our cube, which is textured, of course, with this material here. I'll just click that. Down here, I'm gonna turn Specular off. And if you look at that ball, that just takes the shine away. When Specular's on, it has that shine, when it's off, it's gone. And I think when we render that now, that's sign's gonna stand out so much better than the background. I much prefer that. I'll consider turning Specular down on the left wall material as well. We'll keep the Specular on, I'll just bring the width down, render that. And that looks much better. We now, we got some shininess going on, but it's not completely dominating it. I'll just save that and have a quick look in After Effects as always. I really like the look of that, and the only problem I'm having now is that our right wall texture, which is in After Effects itself, rather than in Cinema 4D, isn't really matching with all this up here. So, I might change it to blending mode, or try changing that from hard light to, say, multiply. And that's a much darker, dingier look that suits the shot that we're creating here. So I'll just save that, and then I'm gonna turn off some of these layers. I'm happy with those and just look at our door texture. And it has a blur on it, I'm just gonna switch the blur off, see what that does. I think without the blur, it's probably going to match better with what we just had in there, so I'm gonna leave that blur switched off. And in fact, I'm tempted to add some noise to it. So I'm going to drag the fractal noise filter onto the door texture. Change the blending mode from normal to multiply. Change the fractal type from basic to rocky and that gives us a really good extra texture on there you can play with these settings to get different looks, different sort of contrasts anything you'd like. But that's working for me quite well now. And you can see that it was worth making this much dingier and darker, because every layer of smoke and light that we add like this, brightens it up. And we don't want it to be too bright. But I'm beginning to reconsider coloring the bars in this way. I think they might look better if they're shiny. So, I'm going to select the ceiling layer and go to Edit Original. And you get the idea now, that this work is very much a case of backwards and forward. You try one thing, you try another. There are no set rules. You will come and try lots of different things until you get something you're happy with. So I'm gonna go to the content browser, look in my presets. Under visualize I'm going to choose materials. And in there, there are lots of metals. Then I'm going to pick something reasonably shiny. Drag that down to the materials browser here, go back to my objects, and then drag that metal on to our null. Now I wanna render that. We can have a look. That looks a little better. But, I'm gonna add a light in here just to give some shine and texture to those. So, I'll create a light and where that is is pretty much doing it's job already. I'm moving it across because if you look down here there's a light source in the scene. So if I move this light down to there, it'll be a little more realistic. Of course, we need to save this and check it in After Effects. I think that's looking a lot better. Really draws the eye now. However, we need to do that when the bars are falling down as well, in the animation layer here. So I'll select that and choose Edit Original. And now, again, go to the content browser, find that metal, drag it down here, go back to the objects and drag it onto our null. Of course we should light this in a similar way. So we'll add a light. Drag that down to a similar sort of position. Now just play through from this 50 frame mark to see how that looks as the light goes past and I think that's very good. Go back to After Effects. Now, one thing about this grill falling is that it's gonna look very CG at this point unless we blur it. So, we need to add pixel motion blur, and I've resisted doing that until this point, because it's so heavy on the processor, especially with a Cinema 4D file. It really slows things down. But now that we're getting to these final stages this is the point at which we do this. So you can see our grill there. Then when I add the pixel motion blur filter it gets a natural looking motion blur. I'll probably turn the shutter samples up to ten for this as well even though it's going to slow down processing, it's worth it just for that extra clarity. Let's turn on our mist layers, go back to the beginning of the shot, see how they look. And I actually think that the mist layers are much to strong and bright. To there, they're overdoing this shot for me. So I might even turn the first one off completely and just leave some of the mist in the background. Now having looked at that, I think I like the mist over the door, but not over these areas of darkness on the left and the right here, so I might just draw a very basic mask. I'm just gonna draw a rough mask around the door frame, feather that, and now we have some of that mistiness over the door frame. But it's not gonna over-brighten the background, and it's not gonna brighten these nice dark areas on either side. I think mist three is probably just too bright at this point. So I'm gonna switch its visibility off, and mist two we'll leave in the background. That's fine. I'm just looking at mist three here. I'm going to switch that that on, and move that up in the frame so that it's over that area. Gonna hit t, and its opacity's keyframe at the beginning there, I'll just bring that up to where we are, and then go back to the two second mark. Change the opacity to zero so that that mist appears gradually and then we'll leave that in places for the rest of the shot. Just a little bit of smokiness to surround our sparks. So this shot is ready to render now, and I will probably do that. But I might also keep experimenting and just get a final shot that has some different looks, different textures. And that's your job as well when you're doing this version. Go in and make your own changes that make this a shot that you're proud of and that you would be happy to hand over to somebody. But the essential work is done and you're ready to render.