4.3 Working With Difficult Shots

Hello! This is Christopher Kenworthy, and welcome to the Visual Effects Compositing course. We've put in our beams of light now. But I think we need some extra smokiness in here. You have to be careful when adding smoke because although, it can create depth and texture, it can also just obliterate the whole image. So we'll add some but we'll be careful about how we do so. Gonna go to New > Solid. Create a black solid. I'll call this Mist1. And we'll apply fractal noise to that. I'll change this from basic to dynamic, and I'll make it 3D. And you can see that's appeared where our 3D layers always appear. So I want to scale it up. Hit S, pull the scale up, but then I also want it to come very far forward in the composition. I want it to be close to the camera. So, I'll go to two views horizontal. So, I'm just going to grab the layer, and drag it towards the camera like that. Over here, I'll move it down. Let's change it's blending mode to add, hit T and bring the opacity right down. Go to one view, and now you can see the edge of the layer here, so it's not positioned properly. But, you can see that as we play through, that smoke and mist is in front of us as we move forward. And we are going to pass through it very soon. As always, I'm going to turn off lots of these layers so that we can see more easily. Now, that's in front of us there, but it's still not as close to the camera as I'd like, cuz I'd quite like to pass through that mist. So I'm just gonna get a hold of z axis, pull it closer to the camera, and maybe angle it towards us more using the rotation tool. So as I drag through, you can see there we actually pass through it around that point. I think I would like to pass through it even sooner than that, so I'm going to use the z+arrow again to bring that closer to the camera. And now, you can see how we passed through that mist around there. Now because we pass through it, it suddenly flicks off which isn't good. So around this point where it's fading out, key frame the opacity. And then at the point where just before it clicks off, drag the opacity down to 0. And that means that as we pass through it, it'll fade gently. You can even pull this key frame back so that that happens more smoothly. Now once it's in the right position, it's a good idea to angle it away from the camera. Angle it away from us ever so slightly by dragging down, and now it's just more of a feeling of depth as we pass through it. I'd also like to put some mist in the background, so I'm going to duplicate this layer. Call it Mist2, and go to two views. Just going to drag it away from the camera like this. I'm dragging over here, but you can see what's happening over here. And that's positioned there in the background. Now, I'm going to angle that a slightly different angle. Hit s to scale that up. And then, we need to draw a mask around this. So I'm gonna want this to be covering this background area, like that. Let's go back to one view. Feather this heavily. Hit T, and bring the opacity right down. And I'll add a fast blur to this as well. I'll just delete these same two opacity key frames here. And I'll just turn off the visibility for the first mist so we can see how this second one's working. And there, that hovers in the background quite nicely, as the whole shot progresses now. Then, just drag on the whole thing to make it longer. So that the mist goes to the bottom of the frame, and now we have that layer hovering just the way we want in the background. So with those two together, you can see that things do start to get very, very misty very quickly. So at this point, I should turn all the other layers back on, and see how it's going to look when everything is together. So, if I turn off the foreground mist and look at Mist2, hit the opacity. I think that can go right down about 30. With Mist1, that's way too bright at this point. So I'll just hit T. And I'm gonna take that down to about 19, which means I need to come to the second key frame here and make that 19 as well. But, I think perhaps this foreground mist needs to first blur as well, so we'll add that to Mist1, turn that up quite high. And that just takes the edge off that mist and makes it a little less difficult to look at. We're gonna try the screen blending mode as well. Switch to full resolution just to see how that's looking. Remember we still do have plenty of time to change all this. So I'm not gonna, not gonna key frame that any more accurately than I have done. You do have the option to add layers all the way through, lots of different layers that hold a different distances from the camera. And that does help to create this sense of depth. So I'm just gonna duplicate this two, which gives us masked three. And all I do is hit V, hover over the z axis, and bring that closer to camera. Then I'm going to hit T, and bring it's opacity right down. So it could be argued that it's best to do all this work at the very end when you know how everything going to look. But I like to do it at this point because it just helps to clarify the look you're going to get once you start adding the sparks and when you come to relight. So if you prefer, leave this till the very last stage and you can add it on at the end. But I like to put it in now just so I can see how the shots developing.