Compositing Workflow between Maya and After Effects (Shot Breakdown)

[Music] okay it looks it started so this was week ten for my independent study which was going over render layers and compositing so I wanted to take a deeper dive and trying to learn a little bit more about you know different render passes how to composite them together you know looking into some more technical things like how the channels and also bit depth and so I try to cover some of those things this week through kind of this little mini project here I just kind of created this shot of this kind of retro computer with this cool HUD display going on so I'm just gonna give kind of a broad overview of the workflow between Maya and After Effects there's honestly a lot of problems steps involved and it took a long time to kind of create the shots start to finish so I'm only gonna cover the big important pieces of information that I learned and also kind of like big steps and important things to keep in mind when you're in a workflow that's similar to this one so without further ado let's let's jump into it so the first thing I did was just created this really simple scene I wanted to do kind of like a retro computer with this you know cool HUD display going on and I couldn't find like a free model of a computer so it's I just went model the one and if you want this same model it's free on my Gumroad so go in links in the description you go and you can go and download that if you want to use this one so and just made the very simple scene and the next thing I did was I set up this camera shot so we have a very simple kind of camera shot going on where it just kind of rotates around and it pushes in just a little bit and the important thing here that I found when working with compositing is there's actually very little variation in this animation so if I pull up the animation editor you're going to graph editor you'll see that these tangents are linear which means that it's really easy to do any kind of tracking if you need to because see this is a straight line and so it's basically point A to point B which is the end of your sequence here right frame 120 so if you can just have two keyframes there it makes it makes all the post work a lot easier so that's kind of like how I try to speed up this shot a little bit in terms of you know getting it made and tracking and everything later on when we do display so that's one thing there the next step I did so we created the shot we added our camera movement and now we're gonna set up some of our render layers so the first thing that I went and did was I basically opened up the render settings and we're gonna go to our AO V's and I just added a bunch of a OBS into the active section right here so I knew that I was going to be working with diffuse and specular and also emission and z-depth because I wanted to do a little bit of depth of field and I also wanted kind of these one of these lights here to kind of I wanted more control over these so I can kind of blink them on and off so I added the few speck emission and Z depth here so if you need to do that you just press any one of these and then click on this right here and if you want to remove it just press this right here so activate those a Ovie's and now when you render it see if we just open up Arnold grabs over here so if you were to play your your your render you would notice that under the Beauty pass we have all of these here now so these are active a Ovie's which means that we can incorporate them into our render layers so the next step there is to open up your render layer settings and basically create each pass that you wanted to do so for this shot I wanted to do I wanted to do let me hide this guy here so I wanted to do a computer with a lit screen and a computer were it had a blank screen so I kind of just duplicated and extracted the the screen here and then added like a very simple shader with an emission on it so I wanted to do one pass here which was very simple say a blank scene blank screen and then another pass where it had the screen lit because I wanted to kind of compost together and add flickering or something like that if I wanted to later on cool so when you've added the your desired a OBS that you want to use in your pass when you render it out now the next step would be to create render layers so you just go up into this tab right here and then you would go and create layer you just name it so render layer doesn't like space in this fight and then you'd right click and create collection and this is where you would add all of the pieces and you've seen that you want incorporate into that render layer so let's just say we wanted to add these pieces of geometry here just middle Mouse drag that over here there's a lot that I did not get into here like expressions and adding overrides of things I just create a very simple render layer so and in order to make that renderable when you export your your passes and everything when you finally do the the render sequence you want to make sure that this is checked right here right so this means that it is a renderable layer then you can actually export it out of Arnold so make sure that's checked and then the next step would be to you know you've got everything basically set up you'll just go into the rendering tab up here render render sequence and oh there is something else we have to do here you just want to go and make sure that these settings are good so go into like the comm and make sure that you have all of this information good and I found that just adding it the the camera that I want it to render from just adding that there worked so make sure all these settings are good and then you would just go over here select camera shape one and then all render enabled layers that's what we just did so make sure that those layers are interval and then you would print make sure your project is set of course you have an output for all of these gigantic files whatever that you're exporting so we render secrets in close and that's basically it so that's the Maya portion of the workflow just setting up a very simple scene camera shot adding some a OBS and then doing the render layers exporting it out so we're gonna hop into After Effects and I'm just gonna kind of break down the process of creating the scene and also a couple different things technically that were really helpful to keep in mind alright so we've hopped into After Effects and here I have just the the beauty pass from that Maya render okay so that that that render from here the first just a very straight out render that we get is this this beauty pass which which looks okay but I wanted a really composite this scene and do and do a lot of different things with it and that's why you rendered out separate layers so that we can really go in and tweak these things individually so here I just have my sequences I have passed one past two and if we just open these up right I go to say the the beauty of the screen that's lit up we have the beauty of beauty you pass on the screen that is blinking and then in here we have a bunch of these the passes the a Ovie's that we rendered out so we have like the diffuse what's the diffuse dragged we have specular you can't and I suspect on that and we also run it out like the emission here if we go to the emission on this one you can see the screen as well and we also have a z2 which I'll get into it in a little bit but basically it's just you have a lot more control if you render those out individually so when you go into something like After Effects you can really comp composite these together and have a lot more control over each individual layer and you can add a lot and tweak a lot artistically if you need to so so here's the beauty pass and then I basically just went in and took all of these layers and just kind of Compton together to kind of get roughly where I was kind of just get back to that you know original beauty pass I'm just adding a little bit of contrast I'm just isolating the frame so you directing more attention here and then at this point I pre composed all of these layers so I could go in a really really tweak thing so I'm here's kind of the power of render layers so you can kind of really go in and if I go into these here if I turn on that computer lights you can see that we can turn this on and off so we just have a lot more control over that and then if you go into here I just took that one pass duplicated at like 8 times and then just isolated using masks each and individual light and just keyed opacity you know we had a bunch of keyframes here but just to make it look like they're blinking and stuff so yeah there's just a lot of control you have there we added the I took the specular of the lit screen pass and I really just posited that together to kind of get when we get to those insight to kind of get this lit screen kind of look using that emission pass as well so if I go in here to like the emission we can see we have that admission pass just can change the color using like human saturation effect back here into the layer and then the last thing I did was I added this kind of HUD display here which I did in a completely separate layer all together and just comp that in here so here's that kind of on its own just kind of a screening at HUD and I just kind of made something quake just kind of something to just sell the idea but this is it seems like there's a lot going on here but it was relatively simple to set up on it's just that there's a lot of text with kind of a decoder animate in so if I just go in here like this one right here just drag that onto these layers of text and then kind of change the keyframes a little bit with these shapes here I used to do all these in After Effects which could work but it's it's very time consuming and After Effects doesn't handle complex shapes very well so what I did was I just went into illustrator and created all these in the illustrator and then what I did from here was I just saved it as an illustrator file and the benefit of working with Adobe is that you can work across different software's so you can just drop that illustrator file into your your After Effects project and work on it from there so just did some work on that and then we really went in and i just added a ton of effects onto that comp just to make it look like you know it's an old retro screen there's a lot of static there's a little bit of scratching on on the on the noise and everything I got a lens there's been yet and there's also a CC lens which just kind of warps that a little bit to kind of get that because we have this this the monitor shape is kind of a rounded surface so I wanted to kind of replicate that so I've had a lot of effects on to that and then I wanted to this was looking pretty good at that at a certain point but I wanted to add depth of field which is where our Z to Z depth pass comes in and so a couple things that I kind of realized and found out during this process is if you work with depth of field out of Arnold you know that there's this horrible problem where you have you have you you import your z-depth pass and then you get it working but you have this really horrible blur that goes around your edge here and it's really hard to get rid of so I kind of figured out a little bit of a solution to that um what I did was I basically just created the the depth of field that I wanted so kind of just getting a little bit of blur over here probably a little bit too much but just to blur it out a little bit you know just get that extra you know a little bit of effect going on in the shot and then I just took this straight so with the kind of nasty blow that we have to go on in here and I brought this into another cop which is where I used an alpha Channel to mask out that that that gross blur that we don't want so a couple things that I realized when I figured this out which is when you work with EXR or TIFF files which is what Arnold experts out by default usually they usually come with an alpha Channel and of course you need to make sure that you need to have that empty space in Maya right so anything that's if I open up this camera here so anything that's in this empty space is going to be transparent okay but we we have a floor that kind of expands halfway through the frame right so if we go back now After Effects you can see if I turn this on and see that you don't have enough an alpha channel there and this is the back of the power of render layers is that you could go in and fix these if you wanted to so basically what I did was I just dropped in that pewdie pass and just used it as an alpha mat for our for our layer cop right here so it just cuts out that kind of girls blur that we don't want another thing I realized working on this project was that when you export a zenith pass it is a tiff file or any XR file usually which means that it's gonna be 32-bit which is which is a lot of color information and when you work in After Effects usually After Effects is not set up by default to be working in 32-bit so when you import that zeda paths into After Effects it won't register your depth of field even if you change the curves and everything it's not gonna show up because your file needs to be 32-bit so just keep them on if you're working with depth of field and Arnold you you need to have a 32-bit After Effects project so when I finally weeks.this to the way I wanted it to I just did one more pass the the final quarter just kind of blended everything together and a little bit of green and a little bit of like lens dust and you know added a color let just just to blend everything together and that's where this shot finally kind of came to a finishing point so so that's kind of an overview of what I did this week I know it was very rushed and I went through a lot of steps very very quickly but um I'm probably gonna post the entire after effects file on my Gumroad if you do want to open that up and take a look at it so feel free to do that I feel like I learned a lot this week I'm getting more into compositing at render layers and just the power of them and I think that you know something I realized is that I'm definitely not using these enough as I should as a 3d artist because there's just there's so much you can do with them so it definitely learned a lot just technically and also artistically as well but I hope this was in some way beneficial to you and you know you stick around get some more content going but let me tell thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: T J Cousler

Views: 12,918

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Id: CBnZv2DvkPw

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020