VFX Plane EXR Compositing - Full Visual Effects Tutorial for Maya, V-Ray, & After Effects

hey what's up guys welcome back and I hope you had a fantastic New Year I wanted to kick start 2020 with a brand new video series that I put together showing a full CG visual effect shot from start to finish we're gonna be covering a lot of information everything from how to set up your Maya scene file doing file referencing materials V-Ray lighting V-Ray rendering as well as render passes render layers and the overall batch render process next we're gonna jump over to After Effects and then composite with multi-channel EXR files and then render out a final preview file so there's gonna be a lot of information in these videos I was trying to speed it up and not linger too long on certain subjects but I did try to explain what we're doing not just which buttons to press I'll also have links in the description so you can jump ahead to specific points that sounds interesting let's get started so for this tutorial we're using a model of a T-38 and I downloaded the model from TurboSquid which is available here done by EGP Jet 3D now the model is free but I made several modifications to the plane including adding extra detail modified textures and some extra detail in the geometry as well as the two pilots in the cockpit so if you'd like to use the one on TurboSquid go ahead and download it from the site otherwise you can check the link in the description and download my modified version just be aware that I do not own the rights to this model so I would appreciate it if you did not distribute it without crediting the original author the very first thing that we just do is make sure we have our folders and projects set properly so I have a project folder set up and inside the project folder I have an assets folder this is for objects we'll be referencing such as the plane we have a scenes folder this is for the Maya scene files and a source images folder at this point these are the only folders that we need I don't recommend doing the automated approach which will generate a lot of folders that we will never need this keeps our folder hierarchy pretty clean and we can create more as needed so we need to set our project here copy this half of the file set project paste in the path and then click select folder now we need to create a workspace so just create a default workspace and then we're good to go what we need to do now is get our object inside of Maya and there are two ways to do that there is importing which will take that object and save it inside the Maya scene file and there's also referencing so referencing has two main advantages and the first advantage is it allows other people to work on that same model while let's say mater's start animating it so in a typical production environment once you have started on the model animators will need to start animating with it so you will want to have people who can work on the files at the same time so modelers can continue to make changes and animators can at least start working with something it also allows updating a model with a newer version very very simple or even swapping out to a completely different model entirely this is very very convenient the second advantages is that it keeps your Maya scene files smaller for example if you have a very very large model or a collection of models and those models are being saved inside each Maya scene file your scene files could easily be in the hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes and if you're saving multiple versions of these files you're going to use a lot more space with referencing you're only going to be looking at one file and all the scenes that use that reference will point to one object and not have duplicates of that object in each scene so we're going to be using that method let's go up to file create reference and we're looking in the assets folder for t-38 Talon FBX double click so references are indicated in the outliner with a little blue diamond in the icon so this means that we can change things like the animations we can change textures and materials but we can't change the geometry itself so changes to the geometry will have to be done on that FBX file directly then what we're going to do now is we're going to add some animation to this plane and the way we're going to do this is with some simple expressions we're going to go to create locator and the locator is going to act as a additional way of being able to move this plane so when you're moving this locator you could think of trying to place it where the centre of balance is for a much larger plane makes it seem a little bit more realistic if the locator is lower but for something lightweight like this you could do something just above the wing so next what we're going to do gonna take this t-38 model metal mouse click and drag it over the locator and now this locator can be animated with an expression and we can still animate the plane directly such as rotation here okay so for this locator we're just going to call this turbulence and then we're going to add an expression to the rotate so we're going to right click on rotate and create new expression we have the object an attribute name we can copy this down here I'm gonna paste this in and we're going to specifically say rotate so we're gonna use a noise expression and we're passing in the time parameter which will give us a unique number every frame and we're just going to multiply this by let's say a quarter then we're going to repeat this step for y&z so I'll just copy this and just change the letters right here instead of 20.25 I'll do something like five instead and we click create we could just move this off to the side now when you use an expression on that channel you'll get a little purple box which indicates it's being driven by an expression and I'm going to extend this timeline to 200 frames so what we've got right now at the plane is kind of wobbling slightly so to edit changes if you don't have your window open anymore you can just right click and say edit expression and then when you open up that box again you just click Edit to save those changes that's what we've done we've added some slight amounts of turbulence and doing this type of animation will take a long time to do by hand and we've done it just in a few seconds and the reason we have a locator is so we can take this plane and then still be able to animate our own custom animations of it banking or going up and down or whatever we want okay so next we need to create a camera I'm going up to create camera just a regular camera now I'm going to keep my perspective view click space and we're going to go over to a new view right-click over the camera and then say camera one and we're going to position this camera one of the things that we need to do when setting up a camera is determine the correct focal length focal length is absolutely vital when doing visual effects because if you use a camera focal length that is incorrect is going to give away the fact that this is a CG shot for example this is by default a 35-millimeter lens go into your attribute editor camera shape and view it here a 35-millimeter lens is considered wide-angle so to frame this in the shot properly we will want to take our resolution gate and this indicates what is going to be rendered you can tell this is wide-angle by the foreshortening so at the front end of the plane looks a lot larger than the back end of the plane but in visual effects you always try to mimic what a camera would see and if this was for a film or a movie whatever it would require another plane to be flying very close to this one so the cameraman can take this shot but using a focal length of 35 would require the videographer to get very very close to that plane and that would be well outside what is considered a safe distance so if for doing aerial photography you would want to have your focal length set to something more like 80 80 is going to be flattened the image out it's going to reduce the foreshortening and this is going to look more realistic so if you look at any type of exam of areal aviation photography or videography you will more commonly see much higher focal links so I would say 80 is a pretty good low value you could go all the way up to 120 and that would be considered pretty normal as well I'm going to leave mine at 80 it's right here we're going to start at frame 0 and I'm going to position the camera somewhere here I'm going to click s to set a keyframe for all the channels and then we're going to go all the way to the very end of where we want the animation to stop so I'm going to say that's going to be probably around 185 I'm going to pop over to a perspective view here so I can can't angle or a slightly nothing more like this and when you're framing the shot you just want to make sure you have enough space at the edge so if you wanted to add camera shake or something which would require you to cut in a little bit up your shot you still have room of the sides or something like that will be fine we just need one other key frame to keep the plane in the shot let's go to frame 120 I'll just lower that to there pull out a little bit here the beginning now I also have the Otto Kieran so this is why I don't have to keep hitting s this will be pretty good so next we're gonna go into the graph editor so windows animation graph it it and there's a few things that we need to do here so let's switch over to the channel box we do not need animations on all these frames so what we can do is go up to edit delete by type static channels and that will remove anything that does not have a keyframe on it and then right here I'm gonna make these tangents linear I want the camera to already be moving at the very beginning of the shot not be stationary so it's not gonna ramp up speed it's already gonna be going pretty fast so we can come back and tweak these later for now this is fine and I'm actually gonna make one more change here I'm just gonna raise this a little bit so it's not going to go quite so close to the edge that's something like that's pretty good and to do this we're going to be using V-Ray let's go up here to our render settings so I have V-Ray already set as the default render and there's going to be quite a few things that we will change here but we're gonna do all of that later but we do want those in V-Ray I'm going to change our Max render time down to 0.1 this will limit our render time to a tenth of one minute or six seconds and we're going to go up to GI and make sure GI is turned on next we're going to go up to create lights and we're looking for a V right dome light make this a little larger now this is only to keep the object out of the way it doesn't make any difference on how the light reacts now we're going to use this dome light to be able to use an HDR image so we're going to select the dome light click on use dome text and then click on dome text here we're going to go into file and we're going to look in the source images folder I actually have to set up here I'm just going to use this one and click OK now to see it in the viewport you're going to click on the little texture switch and then it is displayed in the viewport now I'm going to go into IPR and then just have a look and what this render looks like now the benefit of using a dome light is that it allows you to use direct and indirect illumination just from the HDR itself which will become pretty important when we start using passes let's go over to a perspective view I'm also going to turn on text review there okay so this is completely clipped which I will talk about in another video of why this is not great to use but this is an HDR image so that means we're getting a lot more values and what the monitor can display so you can change this but by changing this part here you're probably gonna make everything else a bit darker I personally don't want to have to look at the Sun because if we look at the Sun we should see lens flares and I don't want to have to composite lens flares and deduced lens flares properly you really need dedicated software for like optical flares and I know that a lot of you guys probably don't have that so I'm just going to cut the camera off before it gets to that point and then we should not have to worry about the Sun you'll also do something from another angle and that would be fine as well now if you want to rotate your dome light you can't just rotate this dome that picture stays static so what you have to do instead if you look at the connections in the attribute editor there is a node called V-Ray place environment text and this is how you do the rotation you can also do vertical rotation as well but for now I'm just going to leave this at the default so this next part brings us to surfacing and texturing now this object that I'm using came from turbosquid and this was a free object and this looks pretty different to the one that's available online so the textures were different it lacked detail which I added in the UVs were not complete I kind of changed some of the Eevee's I did add quite a bit of detail to the tail you can see we go to a wireframe view there's a few other things that will make this look a little bit more realistic but overall it's it's fairly good the topologies alright and we really won't notice any kind of imperfections like if we look underneath the wing you can see that it's just intersecting there one of the most important things to get right in visual effects is time management and time management is something that a lot of people have a problem with especially if you're a perfectionist and I consider myself quite often to be a perfectionist and it's often detrimental to your ability to get stuff done so with modeling if I'm modeling something for myself I'm with the topology to be absolutely perfect I don't want intersections I want everything to be evey perfectly but for visual effects it often doesn't matter so this is not for like doing a game or doing something where the player or where the camera can look at any different angle for visual effects if you know that plane is going to be very very small like in the distance you should not spend very long modeling or texturing or surfacing or anything what's more important is the animation is good and the materials act how they should act from that distance so in our case if we look underneath the plane there is no detail underneath the plane so there's some detail that I added in the texture but since the camera is not going to be underneath the plane we do not need to waste time doing it this is one of the most important things to get right if you can't see it don't waste time doing it or if it's too small or you're not going to see that detail don't waste time doing it so let's take a look at the materials we have up so to make this process a little bit easier I have sectioned out part of the plane and already given standard Lamberts and Phongs now for this we're going to convert all of these to V-Ray materials and I'll show you the main jet one and the glass but the rest I'm just going to skip over because it's the same process so to determine what object uses which material there are two ways you can either click on the object and go to the material which this uses metal dark and it also uses jet or you can go to a specific material node right click hold it down and do select objects with material and anything that is highlighted means that it uses that material okay so for this what we're gonna do we're gonna start with jet and double click here we're not going to use the material viewer because array is not fully integrated with it and you'll notice that there is lacking quite a few of the options when we converted this so I'm just going to close the hypershade and we're going to convert this now you can't convert it back from a V-Ray material but all of the standard Maya materials have this type feature that you can change and what we're looking for is a V-Ray MTL V-Ray MTL and that will automatically convert the material to a V-Ray material and you will notice that the parameters are a little bit different but they are all gonna do more or less the same thing you just have a lot more control so also with Lambert's you don't get any type of reflections but with the variant materials you do of course get reflections so let's go into diffuse color file and we're looking for this t-38 color jpg when you do that you can see that's been applied and everything looks ok so this model here has very very little detail in it but in the texture I added in some panels from a blueprint of a t-38 to give the illusion of detail and that's very very effective after you will see a little bit later in this video you can't really tell that those are real panels or just lines of panels it's always better to have this type of detail modeled in a lot more things you can do with it especially if the camera get close you kind of have to do that but at the distance that we will be viewing this problem you would not be able to tell when this is rendered so let's take a brief look at the materials here so the original textures that came with this looks pretty drastically different so it does not look realistic to the plane even though the proportions of the plane are good you'll also notice that this is not a standard resolution so standard for UVs is going to be one-to-one or just a square so what I did I stretched this up and I compressed the UVs to match the scale so if you look at the original model this is going to look a little bit different to the one that I'm using here so when I redid the materials the color ended up looking like this so this is from a blueprint this is the underneath side which was not originally in the map and I also added from a blueprint these panels here and I added a NASA version of this now the proportions of these are not all the same especially with some of these larger objects here like this is for the gear but the gear is not viewed in this so I just left them in the V's but they're not being used in this version for this next part here I'm going to find a good angle that we can start looking at this material I'm gonna have the IPR open and we're going to start looking at the reflection now a couple things about the V-Ray frame buffer which make this a little bit easier to use so if you click on this little button here this allows you to open up some adjustments for example you can go into curves check mark curves and then you can brighten up the image so these are really good temporary adjustments so you can see what you could use to composite these later you can also save this information in a lot which I will explain later so if we zoom in here you can also see there's quite a bit of faceting so these hard edges and this is because V-Ray by default it does not automatically render any smooth shaded version so to change that I'm gonna stop the IPR go up to our render settings go into overrides and make sure you check V port subdivision and then close it and restart the IPR and now this is changed and it's smooth how it should be so while I'm messing around with this camera I also going to change my perspective camera to also mimic the rendered camera so at an 80 millimeter and I'm going to render this again okay so this is a pretty good view for us to start looking at some of the materials and start messing around with textures I'm going to keep the frame buffer open but I'm going to close down the adjustments tab and just select the fuselage go up to this V-Ray material I'm going to change this material name to match what it was originally this is jet there were no textures provided for reflection or glossiness I will explain these in a moment so we are gonna have to go in and add in custom maps for these but for right now we're just going to add in some settings so we can get a more realistic looking surface but we will have to break up some of the reflections here what we're going to do we're going to go down to the reflection type and there are several types here I prefer award for doing this kind of plane metal and we're just going to take this reflection color and crank it all the way up by doing that we're allowing reflections to be shown this amount is the amount of reflections so if this is at black is just reflecting nothing even though the reflections are at a hundred percent likewise if you put this all the way up to white and then you set your reflections to zero you won't get any reflections so this amount is for if you have a map placed in here that you can't change the values easily you can just lower the percentage of how much of that map is being used now glossiness is a way of determining how mirror-like the surface is so a bathroom mirror would be a hundred percent you can see your exact reflection that would be one hundred percent something that is going to be a lot more diffuse would be much lower so if I lower this your highlights are gonna get much smaller and also more diffuse so at point eight just doesn't look nearly as shiny now right now I'm just gonna leave this at 0.9 unless you're making a mirror never leave this at a hundred percent next thing is we're always going to use Fresnel reflections and we're going to use glossy reflections but in order to get a little bit more shine on this i'm going to unlock the Fresnel IOR which is the index of refraction to the refraction index of refraction and what that means is we can change the refraction of the material itself differently to the refraction of the surface so in this case i'm going to set my for now IOR to three and this is going to give us a nicer looking metal for this next part here i'm going to open up this history tab and we can allow history so we can compare to previous versions so I'm going to enable history by clicking that power button you can determine a preset directory if you want to but I'm just going to use the project path autosave and click OK so auto-saving only works with regular renders not IPR but since we've already set a maximum render time of six seconds this is perfectly fine to wait so this took nine seconds to render it does its best to hit that six second mark but sometimes it goes over so right here we can now compare this two versions in a moment so for this next part we're going to open up Photoshop and we're going to take a look at how we can improve a texture so I've already explained that I made this color image from the original image provided and I made it into a square as well and it makes it a little bit more convenient to use we have the bottom side and then we have the two side views then we have some accessories here this for a color map is perfectly fine and any other types of detail can be added to the reflection maps I think a lot of beginners and a lot of students especially get confused of how to make a reflection material or rely on software such as substance painter to do all of this for them and substance painter and substance designer are fantastic pieces of software if you know how to use them and if you know how to customize them but I found that a lot of students using substance if they don't have their connections done correctly or they don't have any map in a reflection map they'll say oh well my reflection is just 100% white and that's what substance said and that's correct and and that is incorrect and I do think that it is a good idea to learn how to do things manually so you understand how they work so we're using Photoshop here and I'm going to show you how you can create a reflection map now in V-Ray reflection maps are what you might consider to be a specular map and specularity is a type of reflection but in V-Ray specular reflections are calculated automatically so a specular reflection is just simply going to be a concentrated amount of reflections at a specific angle okay so what we need to do first of all a lot of students will create a black and white version reflection maps can have color but in this case we don't really need any color so we can just go in to select an adjustment layer go to hue and saturation and just lower the saturation we have to understand what a reflection map is actually doing at this point so for example anything that is dark would not be reflective and I think that is white would be reflective but that's not how this material would actually work so this is just black paint and black paint is still reflective but if we were to use this map there would be no reflections on the nose of the plane likewise but this straw and these labels here they would have very very limited reflections along with this logo but the rest of the plane would be very very bright any type of decal if it would be made in the same material like this kind of paint has to be removed I'm assuming that you guys know how to use Photoshop it is usually a prerequisite for doing this type of stuff so I'm going to speed up the process so what you would have to do here you'd have to select something like the magic wand select these stripes go over to your brush sample the color and you want to fill this in with an alt backspace command and this is a rather tedious process but it is absolutely necessary for creating a realistic reflection map can you even use things like the clone stamp tool to repaint some easier parts now if you have a little bit of detail left in that can often be to your advantage but in this case we don't want anything that looks like it's lettering any type of detail in the reflection map would simply have to be some kind of like rougher part of the plane or something that's slightly more dirty than the rest of the plane and that's fine to leave in a little bit of detail and as I said originally if this was for a very big budget film or something that would have to be very very close to the camera you would want to spend a lot more time making this map very very nice but for something as simple as what we're doing it's not that important so don't spend a huge amount of time doing this but you do want to make sure that the reflection map makes sense because if it doesn't your visual effects is always going to look off and the next thing we're going to need to do is find some kind of grungy map to try break up the reflections so this is another thing that the gunner is often for yet but very very clean reflections is gonna make your object look like it's CG and almost no material in the world is gonna be perfectly clean even if it's polished chrome you're gonna get little tiny scratches here and there so we're gonna find a good map that we could use for this so I here I have this tileable metal material I'm gonna copy this and paste it in then I'm gonna quickly just tile this over the entire canvas by holding down the Alt key in to snapping it grabbing a whole section ctrl e to merge them and do the same thing with the Alt key and the shift key merge them all again move them all the way to the top so for the blending mode we'll do something like DIF this will allow the black edges to show up and then we can lower the opacity now of course I have not finished this one here the same thing would have to be done on both sides but I just want to show you how you can quickly add in some rougher detail and go into filter blur and Gaussian blur and do something maybe around 2.5 to 3 just kind of blur those edges a little bit more and then add some contrast with a curve so click control m to bring it curves you can have a little bit more contrast there you increase the opacity to tad do something more like that so this is a really good way to start using a reflection map I'm gonna keep working on this one finish this up and then I'll show you the final result but something like this would be a good place to start all right so here's my completed map pretty homogeneous and there's some edges in areas but it's going to be fine for what we need I have removed all of the decals and logos and all the anything that was way too dark this is going to be fine for what we need okay so now we're back in Maya click on our jet model so in V-Ray the reflection color indicates what type of values or colors are going to be reflected the amount is how much of this map or this value is going to be used reflection glossiness is going to be the size of the highlight or how diffuse the reflections are so if it's going to be very mirror like as I said you're gonna put this at a very high value and if it's going to be very low it's gonna be very low value okay so we're gonna load in our reflection map here if you have a specular map you would put it in your reflection color you can also put specular maps in glossiness maps if you want to be able to have you more customized and more varied amount of glossiness so we're going to click on the input connection go into file and we're load-in that reflection actually going to stop IPR here so I was a good idea to pause IPR or stop it when you're adding in new textures and I'm gonna do the same for glossiness as well even though that these are the same map since it has no color we can use it as a glossiness map as well I'm gonna restart the IPR and now you can see there's a lot more detail on the plane like all of these highlights here I'm going to stop this and do a proper render and then we can compare the history so going back to the original one that we had this is going to be down here this is the one that we had with the correct settings on in terms of the amount of reflection color and glossiness this looks pretty good but this is with maps on so this looks a lot more realistic this with those simple maps that we added on and oh here's another useful thing that you can do with the frame buffer you can set one to be a want to be be and you can get a slider so you can go in between them between these two renders you can see that the latest one that we did with those two maps even just more of a homogeneous grunge map we've added a lot of really good detail and it makes the plane look a lot more realistic I'm going to show you now we're going to do the glass and then we're going to go ahead and do the lights on the wings and on the tail and then the rest will just be up to you to finish up yourself okay so I'm gonna minimize this alright so let's go ahead and select the glass we're going to convert this again into a V-Ray material so the most important things for glass is going to be the reflection and the refraction so for the reflection color we can crank that all the way up to white and glass does have a mirror like quality to it so we can leave the glossiness at 100% next is going to be the refraction I'm gonna take the refraction all the way up to a hundred percent it's going to allow the light to pass through it and then for the index of refraction this is going to be the amount of distortion we get this is a fine value to use you could go a little bit lower or a little bit higher but I'm going to leave this at the default value and then I'm gonna use effects shadows okay so this looks pretty good we've got the light passing through and we also have reflections of the environment you can see down here and if we turn around you should probably be able to see a little bit more clearly let's go ahead and do the lights next so this is going to be the portside light which is red covered this to a V-Ray material now for the diffuse color I do have a texture that I provided for this it's nothing special it's just something to give the illusion of detail it's not even really vide this is our left light so grab that in there and we can use the same one for our self illumination color as well and I'll load in the same thing I am actually going to use unique files for these just in case you to change one of them later don't forget to change the name turn on self illumination GI so this light actually does affect the global illumination for the reflection color we can crank that up and then just lower the glossiness quite a bit and if this light ends up being a little bit bright we can we can lower that either in post or go into the color balance and change it there same thing for this light convert it to a V-Ray material let's change the name okay so let's have a look at these this looks a little bit bright but the whole point of this exercise is to practice compositing so this is a good candidate for something that we can reduce or just tweak in post so for right now I'm just gonna leave it as it is go to this light up here this is another light that I have a texture provided I'm gonna convert this to a V-Ray material again call this tail light not a diffuse color has a map and so does the self illumination and reflection color now for the reflection color take down the reflection glossiness quite a bit anymore like that and that should be good so the next step here would be to go through the rest of the materials and apply either values colors or for some certain things textures but don't spend a lot of time doing it because most of the stuff inside the canopy you're not going to be able to see an awful lot as long as you get the reflections right that should be good and you have some kind of color but I wanted to show you another way that you can quickly add detail without actually using a texture so for this part we're going to grab this engine cover material we're going to convert this to a V-Ray material like we've been doing call this engines cover now we're going to lower this value quite a bit then in the reflection color input instead of adding a file we're going to add in some noise adding some noise we'll add a little bit of variation we don't really need to change any of the settings they're fine but we're going to go back to the output connection and then we're going to go to reflection glossiness and we'll add a fractal so if we look over at the hypershade we have now added some detail to the reflections without spending any time in Photoshop or Substance it's just a very very quick way of adding some extra detail okay so at this point what you need to do is go all the way through and convert all of the rest of the materials to V-Ray materials add in reflections add in colors and then we'll be ready to go for the next part alright so this next part we're going to do some exhaust so if we look at the back of the plane here inside the engines there are two little cylinders here that you could use as emitters if you wanted to use a particle system and particle systems are the way to go most of the time but in this case our plainness is flying in a straight line and in fact it's actually not moving at all is just we will make it look like it is moving just with the camera angle and we could also move the environment slightly if we wanted to so instead of using a particle system we're just going to make some geometry and then use the rendered silhouette as a matte for use in After Effects so what we can do to begin with here we can add a cube snap this over here holding down the V key go into the settings for the subdivisions width and height we can do for and then for the depth we can do a hundred and I'm going to hold down the D key and the V key simultaneously and just reposition the pivot point to the edge of this object and then I can just scale it out and we can have this go pretty far I'd be a little bit large I'll lower this down a little bit thing like this the next what we can do is flare this out at the end because exhaust is going to dissipate as it flies through the air we're going to first delete the history so that is under edit delete by type history I'm using a custom panel so now we're going to go over to deform and we're looking for nonlinear and we'll click a flare so with flare you get this access so holding down the J key we're going to just snap this in place and then go to the attribute and then the end flare control we're going to increase this quite a bit might do something like four and four so it makes it a bit wider next what we're going to do we're going to add another two former and this one is going to be a texture deformer now on the texture of the former if you go to the option box there are several ways you can do this one is a UVs and if we actually look at the V's right now the V's are not very not very ideal they're not in proportion so we want to go up and just do it like an automatic map and then they'll be in proportion now close that down and then on the texture deformer click create and attention of the former allows you to add your own texture into this but I'm just going to add in some noise add in some noise and by default is going to give you a very very crazy result if we back out we can go to the strength and just lower the strength and then if we go back to the input connection we can increase the frequency ratio and we can also do things like lowering the amplitude or changing the type the low is pretty good wispy is good there these are all pretty useful I'm just going to leave mine on Dillo and what we want to do is animate this time function right here and how to do that is just right-click create a new expression and I copy this attribute here paste and we'll just set that equal to time and then click create so if we scroll forward it's always going to oscillate back and forth so this looks pretty good but it is flat on one side so we want to change that select the object and now they go to the texture deformer here or you can access it in the outliner as well and we need to change the direction from handle to normal and that will allow to go out in both sides we're also going to click the three key to smooth that out and what we've got is some pretty simple looking exhaust that we can use if you wanted to do more with that flare it's also possible to do that we could make it a little bit tighter at the beginning but fits better into the engines something like that okay so to get the other side what I want to do is go up to edit duplicate special make sure the option box is checked this will allow any any connections to be preserved and click duplicate next we're going to select the copy of the handle and the textured form of the new one and we're just going to move them over there's something like this so to make these not exactly the same I'll select the second one go into the texture of the texture deformer on this expression we can edit that expression you notice that the expression is now slightly different this is number four instead of what it was before add a value to this and click OK so don't worry if it's a little bit sharp we're only using this as a matte so we're only looking at the silhouette that this shape provides okay right so now we are ready to start setting up our scene for rendering so we're going to make use of render layer so it's this button over here I already have render layers integrated into the UI so render layers give us the option of rendering certain objects or lights separately and it also allows you to specify specific render settings on a per render layer basis instead of a master layer so what we're looking at right now is this scene layer which is considered the master layer and the eye indicates that you're looking at it and this clapperboard means that this is renderable so if you batch render this this means that this layer would render so right away we're going to turn this off because we don't want this master layer to render instead we're gonna specify three separate render layers one is going to be for the plane one is going to be for the exhaust and one of them is going to be for the background to create a new layer we're gonna just click on this new layer button and we're gonna type in plane once you have a layer you're gonna right-click over and then you can create a collection now collections can hold transforms they're gonna be objects and you can also do things like shaders lights and there's quite a few other options for you there we're just going to be using transforms and what we want to do is take this turbulence node and you can either middle mouse click and drag it up or if you pull this over there's an option to add an object so you can add the object in there already can simply click and drag it up here what we've just done know if we've added the plane in there and if we click this little eye we now switch to that render layer and you notice that the exhaust goes away now by default all lights will be on all of your layers now you can customize this but for what we need we do need all of those lights to be across all of the scenes so I'm gonna switch now to my camera and I'm going to also go back to our 200 frames here and we're gonna just find a good frame this will be pretty good for what we need and then I'm going to go into the IPR so what we want to have is the plane by itself and right now we are getting the background in there as well so the reason we want to separate elements inside of Maya is so that when we work in after-effects is much easier to composite so for example if we look at the Alpha here the entire Alpha is occupied with pixels and in order to control L of this plane like doing color correction or adding some heat distortion or whatever or adding some kind of depth it's going to be very very difficult to control without having a matte of just a plane and even with a matte pass it's much more difficult to control if the background is occupied so we need to go and disable the background from rendering let's go into our V-Ray dome light go into options and make sure you click invisible so now you can see the background is gone and if we look at the Alpha the Alpha is only occupied over the plane okay so I'm going to pause the IPR and now we're going to go ahead and add a render layer for the exhaust I'm going to select back on the master layer I renamed both of these objects exhaust one and two just to make it a little easier to find I'm going to create a new render layer exhaust right click create a collection and then just add these objects or just middle mouse click and drag them into this collection now we can switch to this collection and now we're only looking at the exhaust back to the IPR and you can see just the exhaust is there so another really really useful feature of render layers is the ability to use layer overrides for example for this exhaust we don't really care about the render quality of this and we don't really care about the fact that there's reflections and global illumination and it's being illuminated by this HDRI so what we want to do is make some changes to make this render much much faster so if we go up to render settings we can create an override for any Eddy setting inside the render settings window so we can go up to render using right click and create an absolute render override for visible layer now if you don't see this feature it means that you're still on the master layer and on the master layer you can't override it because it is the main settings you can only override custom layers that you create so BSA create absolute override for visible air this will now turn orange and when it's orange you should notice that it is added a tab up here called absolute override and this allows you to change it so we can say for example Maya hardware so the Maya hardware 2.0 is a very very fast renderer if we were to just render a frame of this you can see it's already done less than a second and it's done and since we don't really care about any of the shading we only need this as a matte this is a much much more efficient way than rendering all the detail and quality that the array can provide I'm going to close this down now if we go back up to the master layer here you can see that the master layer still is using V-Ray and plane lair is also still using array so if you're using Maya for visual effects or even just for regular rendering you should be using their overrides it is much much more efficient than trying to disprove force everything okay so next what we're going to do we're going to create one more override and this is going to be for the sky switch to the sky so the sky doesn't actually need any objects and we don't even really need to create our own collection the collections can be automatically created when we start making override changes so what we want to do on this since we turned the sky off inside the down light we're going to override that to be on but only for this sky layer we're going to select the dome light go over to where it says invisible right-click and do you create override for visible layer when that is orange you can click the check now if we go over to IPR the sky renders and you can see that a light collection has been added for us right here and there is an override on this layer so next what we're going to do is set up all the render settings for each layer I'm going to start on the plane layer we're going to start on the common tab and just work our way down and across all of these other tabs the very first thing is what we're calling the file and where it's going to save so we're going to delete this we're going to use a file token here to determine the hierarchy of our file structure so if you're going to be rendering many versions of the same file which you probably will be if you're working for a client or even for yourself you're never going to get it right the first time and you should never render over previous versions so we're gonna make a folder we're gonna call the folder whatever the version number is click version and then we're gonna do a slash so the slash indicates that it's going to create a new folder next we're going to right-click and do layer so it's going to make a new folder called version and a folder with the same layer name as the one that we are currently rendering next we're gonna do another slash and then this is going to be the name of the file itself right click layer again underscore and then the version number now you can put your own file name but if you're using this method make sure you don't type this in manually just right click and select whichever one you want so many students that I've seen have either written something incorrectly or not exactly how it's written here and then it won't save any of your files it will still render them it just it's not gonna save them you also if you have a version listed here you have to have a version labeled you can't leave it blank if you leave it blank again it's just not going to save it so in this case we're going to start with whatever version your file is I'm on version two so I'm going to start on version two next is going to be the image format you should never use PNG s if your going to be doing some compositing always use a excel and for this we're going to be using a multi-channel DX ARS the multi-channel is going to allow all of the different passes which I'll explain in a second to be integrated into a single file this makes compositing a lot easier or replacing files a lot easier next we're going to go down into the image format options this is where you can change a lot of settings most of the time I just leave this at 16 bits we don't really need full float for what we're doing you can but it's gonna make your file size a lot larger we're just gonna leave that there compression type leave this on scanline zip if you use uncompressed eyx ours they'll be enormous so we're going to definitely compress them now this is a lossless compression so it's fine to use ok so next we're gonna scroll down here open up animation you need to switch it to standard and then the end frame is going to be 200 you also want to check the render animation only in batch mode if you don't click this and it will start rendering from the very beginning of the animation however if you want to view the animation without batching it you can uncheck this and view the entire animation as it renders in the frame buffer so next we're going to click on the renderable camera it's going to be camera one for the presets here you can just go down to HD 1080 we're rendering in 1920 by 1080 and next we can go over to V-Ray now for V-Ray what we're going to be using the CPU rendering we're going to be using a progressive sampler this is going to be a bit faster than bucket because we can determine the maximum render time for this first pass we're going to keep this pretty low because nearly all the time that you render out something there's going to be something wrong there's no point rendering a final quality if you haven't even seen what it looks like in after-effects yet next we're going to go down to color mapping and we're not going to allow any tone mapping or color mapping so we're going to set the mode to don't affect colors only adaptation there's lots of different types of tone mapping which I'll hopefully explain in another video but just take my word for it if we're going to be compositing all of this we don't want to use tone mapping here next we're going to go over to GI and there's not anything you have to change here just make sure that it is on we don't need to change anything in settings and overrides you need to go up to camera and then make sure you enable motion blur and then make sure viewports subdivision is checked and there is something we have to do in environment so let me just move this over I will switch to IPR so we can see what this is going to look like now previously what we did we got rid of that background which is what we wanted to do but you'll notice that through the glass that environment is no longer visible and we need that visible in refractions so what we have to do is go into our environment tab scroll down an able override environment and then for the refraction texture we need to load in the V-Ray dome light environment and a pause the IPR here move this over so we're going to select the dome light go over to our dome light shape go to the dome text and we never renamed this file and usually I don't bother but for something important like the HDR we're going to just mean this sky HDR so now we can go up to the hypershade go over to textures and then it's easy to find the sky HDR move this over a little bit then we're going to middle mouse click and drag this texture into the refraction texture and minimize this go back over to IPR resume it and now you can see the sky is being placed back inside the glass ok so now we can stop the IPR minimize it and move on ok so the next important part is going to be the render elements more commonly these are just called render passes so render passes are separate attributes of the beauty pass and the beauty passes all of the main passes that you need to create the shot that you see in the frame buffer and by separating out all these passes that allows us to composite them in a much easier way so for example let's say you render out your plane and you think that the reflections are too strong instead of having to go back and rear ender the entire thing again you can simply go to the reflection pass and lower the opacity of that pass in after-effects or play around with the color correction likewise you can do things like change the color of the stripe or change the amount of direct light it receives there are a lot of different options that you can use here you can also use diagnostic render passes and some other ones as well if you would like to find out more information about this you should check out Kaos group's documentation they have a lot of information and a lot of images that go along with these so you can compare what each of them do we're going to be using a cific type of workflow here that requires some compositing but not a lot of compositing we're only going to be using five or six different passes so it's going to give us a fair amount of control but still there's a lot more control you can do with separate anything like shadow information so when you're adding your render passes make sure you're on the layer that requires render passes neither exhaust nor sky actually need any render passes and by adding them on the basilar layer you're going to force them on every single layer and it doesn't take any additional time usually to render out passes with the exception of diagnostic passes and things like extra text or or passes that do not comprise the Beauty the beauty pass is basically whatever the master layer renders and whatever is rendered to the frame buffer the only thing that takes additional time is physically saving out those individual passes it doesn't take any additional time to calculate them let's go ahead and add in direct lighting so that's called just lighting and when you do that you'll notice that a a o V is added an AO V stands for arbitrary output variable next we're going to add in global illumination so GI then we're going to need reflection refraction and you only need refraction if there are objects in your scene that are transparent or translucent so we do have glass so we need refraction then we're going to add in specular and then we're going to do a self illumination and it doesn't really matter that the order in which you add these next we're going to add in an extra text to pass now the extra text passes a special type of pass which is actually an embedded render layer so extra text passes do actually take longer to render so whereas render passes generally don't take any additional time to render render layers and extra text passes do so a render layer is going to go in a sequence so for this scene the first render layer is going to be our plane render layer then it's going to be the exhaust and then it's going to be our sky and just make sure that all the ones are rendered have this clapperboard icon turned on this indicates that they are set to render we don't need to render it the master layer so the more render layers you have the longer it will take to render your scene generally the more passes you have doesn't really make a difference with the exception of the extra text pass because it is in fact a embedded render layer so we're going to rename this to Bao this is only for our references it doesn't change the name of the pass inside of NEX our file so to change it there we're going to click on extra v-very attributes go into the explicit channel name and also type in AO now for the texture you can apply whatever type of material you want or whatever type of texture you want so we can go into our texture go up to V-Ray dirt which is our AO and then we can see the results there now just as a quick note if you want to separate out different objects to use different AOS you're going to have to use that in a separate render layer and you would create a material override and if you do want to use a material override with vr8 dirt you first have to apply a surface shader to the material override and on the surface shaders out color then you add in every red dirt okay so let's go ahead and render this out and see what we have in the frame buffer the way that you cycle through your passes is go up here you have lighting so there's direct illumination then you have GI which is going to be indirect illumination you have your reflections refractions specularity specular refers to light at specific angles and usually more intense reflections so we have quite a lot of specularity here which is pretty good next we have self illumination these are just going to be for the lights and then we have AO AO is supposed to be for very very soft shadows this is not really what we want we want something that's going to be mostly white with just black edges so I'm going to keep this up the zoom out make this a little bit smaller what we can do we can increase the distribution so kind of like the contrast between the dark and bright areas and we can also increase the fall-off and take a look at what that produces I'm also going to just lower this radius down so that's a little bit better we have a sharper edge here now this plane relatively in the scene is pretty small it's probably not to scale so we probably should lower the radius a little bit more so something like this would be pretty good for our AO so there's one final type of pass that we're going to add here it's going to be a z-depth pass now what z-depth does it calculates the distance between the objects in the scene and the camera and z-depth is very useful to create atmospheric perspective and also for depth of field so atmospheric perspective here is not particularly important but in the previous example that I showed with the wingman I did use heed up there to be able to have the other plane which is further away appear a little bit more faded because there's more atmosphere between it and then I also used a Z depth before a depth of field calculation as well now depth of field without a plug-in in after-effects is not the easiest thing to achieve however I do want to show you how to set up the z-depth pass here so right here I'm just going to disable the AO pass because it's going to take a little bit longer to render I'm going to go to a top view and on the top I'm going to switch over to the master layer so I can actually see the camera and we're going to add a measurement calculation between a camera and the plane go up to create measure tools distance tool then we're just going to select something in front of the camera to about the midpoint of the plane and it's going to give is the distance between that so as you can see this is really not to scale but it's fine for what we need but this number is going to be very important now going back to Z depth and I switch back to our plane there click on depth switch back over to our camera view and the depth of the entire scene we should do something that's a bit larger than whatever the distance is so we could do something like 20 go back to IPR and this gives us a pretty good amount of depth something that we could edit a little bit later the depth black we could increase that number a little bit because it's not that dark at the front so we could do something like 5 and just reset the IPR adds a little bit more contrast and what you should do now is just go throughout the scene and just make sure that it works at different camera positions as well so this is getting a bit bright so I'm going to increase the depth white a little bit and be tried 25 and that's a little bit better now if you did have more objects in the scene that go further back you would want to go and make sure this value is enough to go past the objects in the background so now we can go back and make sure that a is enabled again so we're going to go back to our exhaust render layer and just make sure that that is set up correctly because this does use a different render engine so for this we're going to do the same thing that we did previously I'm gonna set up version numbers now right-click version version label is to slash render layer / render layer underscore version number for the image format type we're going to do EXR s the data type we don't need full float 16 is fine compression will use zip and for the naming convention we do need to change this it's going to be name dot number extension make sure the skies also set on beer a go to render elements make sure the render elements are set to OFF on the sky since we don't need any of those passes and now we're ready to render there are two main ways you can start batching in Maya one of them is to switch your shelf over here to the rendering tab go up to a render batch render however if you're using a much more intensive scene file I would recommend closing Maya completely so we'll close out Maya navigate to our project folder then we're going to scenes go to the scene file that you've created right click and select render from the context menu this will open up a little window if this window closes it means that the render has stopped it does not mean that the render completed it just means that is no longer rendering so what I also recommend that you do before you walk away go into your project folder wait for the images folder to be created double-click the temp images folder is going to be for anything that you used in the frame buffer so we don't actually need any of that information but this first folder here version 2 we're starting with the plane and we've got our first EXR so I would make sure this actually renders I would double click your EXR open it I recommend using X in view or viewing EXR s I would recommend the full version of X in view and getting all the add-ons which includes in the X our viewer much faster than opening up Photoshop every time but to view eyx ours properly you're going to want to view them in after-effects with the linearized workflow so I'll be talking about color management and the linear workflow a little bit later but for now just keep in mind that anything you see is gonna be a lot darker unless it's in After Effects alright so now that the rendering is done it is time to start compositing when you launch a perf X the first thing to do is double-click your project window and then go and select the sequences from your images folder and double-click the first folder appear and then it doesn't really matter which file you select as long as openexr sequence is checked After Effects will figure out that this entire collection is part of a sequence and then it will automatically import an entire sequence however since we have three of these there is a more efficient way to do this so I'm going to delete that if we open up the images folder in Windows Explorer select all three of these folders as long as there are any subfolders within these folders we can simply click and drag these into the images folder right so if we click on the first one here if you notice up in that it says it's at 30fps but in Maya we worked at 24 FPS which is standard for visual effects let's right click go to interpret footage main and then we're going to assume a frame rate of 24 we also need to go up to color management and under interpret as linear light we need to force this to be on what this means is by default After Effects will only interpret a sequence as having linear light if it is a 32 it's per channel file now we rendered out a raw or linear image sequence but we only did it in a 16-bit per channel format so by default a prefix is not going to recognize that so we need to force it to be on and we can click OK and since we have 3 of these files we can save the settings from the first one we changed and apply it to the other ones to do that we right-click over the first one go to interpret footage again remember interpretation then we select the other two right click again interpret footage apply interpretation now both of these will use the same settings I'm gonna grab this plane sequence here and click and drag it into this comp filmstrip icon what this does it makes a composition that is the same length as the sequence with the same size and framerate let's magnify this by clicking this button down here and fit up to 100% this sequence is 200 frames but generally for visual effects you will put a slate on your first frame we need to increase the length of our composition by 1 frame now to do this we need to be viewing frames if you don't see a frame counter here and you only see timecode like this which is hours minutes seconds frames hold down the control key and select and this will switch it to frames next you can right-click over the title of the composition go to composition settings you can also do it in the project window and you can also do it in the menu appear composition settings or you can use the shortcut key control K so for the duration I'm just going to change this to be 201 click OK we're going to increase the time navigator end so we can view the entire composition click page down on the keyboard to go forward one frame or you can just type it in here and with the layer selected click the left bracket key this will snap the layers of starting position to the position of the time navigator do the same thing with the exhaust and the sky layers drag these underneath and then again click the left bracket key make sure your sky is underneath your exhaust so right now we're looking at the master layer as if we were to render this from the frame buffer this is what it would look like if you could include the exhaust in with the master layer by default which we can't since this is using hardware 2.0 and the sky and the plane are using V-Ray the advantage is now we can solo just the sky the exhaust and the plane and make adjustments to them separately now what we're looking at here is the beauty pass of the plane so this is what you would look at in the frame buffer it does not include AO it does not include Z depth it includes all the other passes that we used so the very first thing that we need to do is separate this plane into all its separate passes but before we do that we are going to rename this one to be the plane beauty click click enter on the keyboard and notice when I click enter this changes from source name to layer name layer name is whatever we rename the file source name is what the original file name is we're going to duplicate this layer with ctrl D on solo these now and the very first pass that we're going to add is the GI or global illumination layer so we're looking for an extractor effect so the extractor effect if you notice that says EXR they're all capitalized and this is a way of separating passes of a multi-channel EXR file so to do that we're going to select anywhere in this blank space go into layers and here we can see all the different passes that we specified in array so we're going to start with GI notice also that the RGB values are all changed to the GI equivalent so we have our GI for r g and b respectively click OK and now you will notice that this is looking very very dark so this is something that we need to do right at the very beginning but I just wanted to show you the result because sometimes it's not evident if you make these adjustments beforehand we need to set up our working space so click where it says 32 B PC this might say 8 or 16 for you select this this is an absolutely vital part of compositing you need to make sure you're using a linear workflow and you have set up the correct working space I'll need to move the project window down here so it can fit on the screen select where it says none and you want to go up here to srgb srgb is the standard working space for most computers and monitors at least Windows monitors so this is using a gamma of 2.2 and then we need to linearize the working space so by clicking linearize you'll notice that the color changes if you forget to linearize your working space and then you realize halfway through your project that you didn't do it you will have to recompose at nearly everything because the values are very different to view the same colors and values that we saw in Maya we have to linearize so before we separate out all the passages go back up to this extractor and we need to unmultiplied it if you notice on this edge here gets a little bit darker when we don't unmold apply it now the unmultiplied effect is a way of removing the background from areas of partial transparency or in this case it's just motion blur if I were to Solo this layer and select my transparency toggle you can see that this area is a little bit transparent if we turn this off you'll notice that areas of the alpha channel that are not occupied by pixels by default will render as black and because this is black we get a really thin black edge around the plane sometimes it is not necessary to unmultiplied but quite often it is so it's safer just to check mark the box so right now we're going to duplicate these passes just go one by one change the extractor effect and change the past name so the next pass is going to be the lighting pass the lighting pass is going to be our direct illumination and the blending mode for lighting is going to be additive so we come up here to add one more thing before we continue if you do not see your blending modes here there might be a toggle switches so you can select this button to toggle between your switches which are these in your modes which are your blending modes and track mats if you'd like to see them both on the same panel which I recommend right click on layer name go to columns and then select switches and or modes whichever one is not selected and then both of them will be on one panel if you have a large enough monitor I highly recommend this it's far more efficient than having to click a button every time okay so next we can duplicate lighting rename the next one to be reflection this again is going to be additive specular which is also additive refraction which is additive and self illumination which is also additive next we have ambient occlusion or AO ambient occlusion is multiplied and lastly we have Z depth now for Z depth you'll notice that if you select Z the RGB values do not change this is because the Z depth channel contains no color information then it only contains a single channel to get any non color channel to work properly go into each RGB Channel and select the channel name now zeda is not composited with a blending mode so we're just going to set this to be normal and then we'll turn this layer off and use it later now we can Unseld it all of these have a look at the entire result in your project folder just go ahead and make a new folder called comps now when you say version numbers you should always save the same version number as whatever the latest render that you did in Maya the latest render was version 2 so you should save your After Effects composition as version 2 as well this makes it much easier to go back and forth between projects and clients can use the version number to tell you what they like to what they didn't like and that same version number corresponds to a composition and also corresponds to a scene file and if you're using After Effects and Maya consistently going back and forth between them make sure you always have the same version number for the comp and the Maya scene and all your frames have the version number on them as well otherwise it's very easy to forget which version corresponds with which file and it can make your life hell - good try to figure that out especially weeks after you've worked on something in a client finally in response or something like that just go ahead and make sure these always are the same as your Maya scene file click OK let's set this to 1/2 resolution so this renders a little bit faster let's go to the very beginning and then just click the spacebar this will load in the sequence into your PCs rim and then it will play in real time now depending on the size and the length of your composition and how much RAM you have in your PC you may not be able to load in the entire shot this case we only have 200 frames so we can it will make it a little bit easier to check what we rendered all right so now this is loaded in the RAM what we can see that it is now playing at 24 fps and there are a few things right away that I noticed that need to be corrected so when you load in your sequence and you get everything composited the very first thing that you should check are all the passes being viewed correctly so when I was compositing all of them appeared to be correct none of the passes were black so a lot of students had this problem where their reflection and specular passes are completely black this generally indicates that in beer a you either have the amount set to zero you have a black map placed in the reflection channel or you have a glossiness of one and if you have a glossiness of one with no HDR image and only one object that you're rendering is very difficult to get reflections to show up properly the same thing can happen with GI just go back through make sure you're using an HDR image or you have at least an environment set up you've placed your reflection maps in the correct channel your maps are not black and your amounts are not at zero those are the easiest things to fix that some of the most common mistakes that I see as far as the composition goes the nose of the plane gets very very close to the edge is almost touching so I want to fix that I want to pull this out a little bit more likewise the exhaust does not extend far enough back and then right at the very end here I'm noticing that the camera kind of does like hits a wall it just seems to stop at around frame 120 it just seems to hit and then just slide it's not very smooth so I want to go ahead and fix that as well also looking at the glass here the refraction looks a little bit too strong it's kind of warping the image behind it a little bit too much glass is not going to be that thick so we want to go back and correct that as well so I'm going to go ahead and set up another render and then we can come back in composite right so in Maya the very first thing I mentioned was the camera not being zoomed out far enough so I want to go ahead and do that so we're gonna up verge in this file save it version 3 select the camera and then I'm just gonna pull out just a little bit I'm gonna set this back to 200 I'm also getting two keyframes here so and that's probably part of the problem pulled back out a little bit to have a closer inspection of these key frames we're going to open up the graph editor and yeah this is a problem here I don't like these keyframes you seem to have two keyframes very close just going to delete those move this off to the side here yeah that's that solves that problem one thing that I would like to do though I don't take these keyframes here so I'm just holding down the shift key and clicking and dragging over these keyframes moving this over to frame 200 so this is looking a little bit better I think what I'd like to do though is around frame 160 I'm going to take this plane and maybe it around frame 120 I'll set a keyframe got a frame 160 and then just pull up the wing let it bank a little bit and then by frame 200 it can go back just so we can maybe see just a little bit underneath the wing select the camera again and at frame 160 I'll just lower the angle just a tad we're gonna have to zoom out a little bit more and it around frame 60 we're gonna pull the camera down just to get this more in frame another thing that I'd like to add is a little bit of camera shake in After Effects so pulling out this far will allow us to be able to crop back in after we add the camera shake so I'm pretty happy with this right now I think this will be okay next thing that we can do here is go into the exhaust and scale both of these exhaust objects back so the furthest out we I think we see is probably around here so as long as I clear the canvas we should be good pull these out and we're also going to have to go into the flare with the flare handle and take the high-bound back up maybe to around 3 otherwise it's going to bulge too soon something like that should be good one more thing I'd like to do is go into perspective you hear really fast select the pilots head I'm just gonna add just a little bit of animation to this pilot makes it will make it feel a little bit more alive so maybe as the cameras coming down kind of glances up at the camera then looks back the other way it's a little bit of really subtle motion but it can look a little bit more realistic this guy he can he's not doing anything important right now you can just look up around here you can look back give this guy just a little bit more movement on his head you can look a little bit more realistic there something just really subtle but something on mine we might notice in the final result okay I also mentioned the class had a little bit too much refraction on it so let's go into the Micanopy glass go down to the refraction IOR and for this we're gonna turn on IPR and we're looking at some of the distortion around the edge here and one thing you can do with IPR is a little bit more convenient than rendering the entire thing we select this little icon up here turns on the region render then we can just click and drag a region that we'd like to focus on and it's not going to waste time rendering anything else and I'll try a refraction of one point two that looks a little bit better if we look at from some different angles yeah that looks a little bit more realistic turn off the region renderer so I have a look at the overall lighting here and one other thing that I'm noticing is I kind of want this screen left side of the plane to be a little bit brighter and this would just allow the plane to look a little bit more visually interesting in our composite so one thing I can do I could go into the HDR and make it a little bit brighter but perhaps what would be a little easier here is to just create a directional light and line it up with the Sun in the HDR I let's go up do you create lights directional light it's gonna rotate this around pull this up and just tilt this down a little bit turn IPR on again I don't want any of the light to brighten the screen right side of the plane so pull this up a little bit so that's looking a little bit too bright so I'll go ahead and just drop that down to maybe 0.5 and if we compare this on off on I think that's gonna help our composite just a little bit all right I don't think there was anything else that we needed to fix let's go ahead and just make sure this is set up properly again version label and you update that to be three for now we're gonna still leave the max render time pretty low and just go ahead and make sure that we are updating everything that we need to so in this case we did change the camera so all of our layers have to be rear-ended if we were only making changes to let's say the plane then we'd only have two rerender at the plane alright so while we're waiting for that new render to finish we can go ahead and start setting up our color correction and doing some other adjustments as well so the very first thing I want to do is some color correction so I'm going to select this top layer up here right click at the bottom go to new adjustment layer type in color correction and I mentioned earlier that in V-Ray there was a way to transfer the color information from the frame buffer into After Effects I want to show that really fast here I'll go back to be an angle like this and do a proper render I'll turn on my image adjustments and we had this curves effect on here which is making everything a bit brighter we also have things like the white balance which will be color temperature that can make the image warmer so let's say I was really pleased with the color of this and I wanted to save this exact color correction and I wanted to use this same color correction inside of After Effects you go up here to Global's click Save we'll just save this in comps I'll call this plane version 3 and we're looking for a LUT file so in after-effects you can add an effect called apply color LUT and what this does it is a lookup table which will use the same values and color correction in V-Ray and across other platforms as well it is a common format for transferring color information quite often clients will send you this yet they have a color that they are happy with and they want all the artists to be using the exact color correction so that is how you apply a lot I'm not actually going to use one in this case I'm going to do my color correction manually I'm going to turn this off and add a curves effect so with curves what I want to do here is I want to make the highlights and mid-tones just a bit brighter and then I'm gonna darken the shadows to add a bit more contrast something more like this I'm gonna go into the red Channel and pull out a little bit of red from the shadows then I'm gonna allow the Reds in the highlights to creep back into their original values which is this straight line here so just toggling between this we've made the clouds a little bit more blue we pulled out some of that red we've added a little bit more contrast next I'm going to add a luma tree color effect now the ulema tree color gives us a lot of adjustments all in one effect which is nice and it is the only way inside of After Effects to change the color temperature without using a photo filter so I'm going to turn on high dynamic range and then in the temperature gauge we can just increase the temperature do a value of around 90 will make it look a little bit warmer like it's sunset unfortunately these values are not in Kelvin which normally color temperature is in Kelvin but the higher the number the warmer the image in this case we also have a lot of options for highlights and shadows without for example if we want to boost the shadows a little bit because they are looking slightly dark we could do a value of around 30 now all of these adjustments you can use in curves but it gets a little bit more complicated so it is nice sometimes to be able to have just highlights or just shadow control next we can also add some contrast here without having to use an additional curves it'd be something at around 40 would be a good value now one thing that we do have to be careful with when adding contrast and brightness especially is clipping now clipping is when the value of a pixel exceeds the working space so in this case this is going beyond 8-bit and my monitor can no longer display these values properly I'm just using a standard 8-bit monitor and any value appear these are floating point values so one represents the limit of an 8-bit working space to any value that goes beyond one means that the value cannot be displayed properly and there's no subtle gradient between higher-level values anything at one that's the highest it can go so if there's a pixels that are even brighter than that is this going to stop at one if I were to add another curves effect here to really extend you ate this effect you'll notice a really harsh line that appears so this looks quite poor it's something that you always want to avoid we're going to just delete this curves that was just as an example and we're going to either lower our brightness of the curves or we can use another effect called the HDR highlight compression so the HDR highlight compression is a way of tone mapping high dynamic range values to low dynamic range values or HDR to LDR so in this case what it does it tries to make sure there's nothing that's going to clip which it does but it makes the image look very gray there are tone mappers I work a lot better than this but if we lock this off it may be a value of around thirty might just lower this brightness of the curves a little bit here and you want to make sure there's no valleys getting above one so this looks pretty good now we go into full resolution here and have a look at these pilots visors you can see there's some highlights on them that are clipping they're getting really really bright so because we have this refraction pass on a separate layer we don't need to fix our overall color correction to simply fix these pixels instead what we can do is go down to our refraction layer and solo this layer and apply an HDR highlight compression on it this is going to be much dimmer and go back so underneath our color correction we can add an additional adjustment layer and call this vignette places underneath our color correction and there is an effect called vignette just drag this on and for now we'll just leave the default values basically this is going to help pull our eye into the shot a little bit more one other thing that I'm noticing here with the contrast of the intakes they're looking very very dark so if we mouse over these intakes we're getting a values of zero zero zero in the upper right hand corner it's not just bright valleys that can clip is also dark values and here we're definitely getting clipping so let's go back to our color correction layer and on this curves effect we'll zoom in on our curves pull this up very slightly you do have to be careful with it don't go too high so we're going to zoom in a little bit more here and just lift this up very slightly then we can zoom back out so these valleys are no longer clipped so the next thing we're going to do is is make the exhaust so we already have a Matt for the exhaust which is fine or rename this layer to be exhaust Matt and underneath the exhaust Matt we're going to grab an adjustment layer let's call this exhaust now on the exhaust layer we're going to change the track Matt to be alpha exhaust is going to disappear but that's just because we're using a track matte and there's nothing on this adjustment layer yet to make this show up we're just going to grab a curves effect and then just darken down the value something something around there will be good we can also add some heat distortion with a turbulent displace effect you can set the amount to be 100 and the size to be five flex 'ti maybe around three and you'll notice that it is kind of wobbling the clouds a little bit hold down alt and click on the stopwatch next to evolution and type in time multiply it by a thousand so this is going to allow it to constantly wobble this looks really really strong right now don't worry it'll look ok in a moment we can either adjust the curves values or we can go and click T and then just lower the opacity so we're going to just increase these curves a little bit make it not quite so dark we could also add a fractal noise pattern over the top of this and change the blending mode to be multiplied the noise type we could say dynamic go into the transform and then just reduce the scale quite a bit and we can also do the same thing with evolution that bent I'm asterisk and then maybe something like 2000 because this does not track with the plane is this kind of everywhere over the entire comp we wanted to move around quite a bit and then we could even lower the opacity of this so it's not quite so strong we want it to be fairly subtle we just want an essence of it being there I think this will look pretty good I will have to see it rendered before I can make those judgments so moving on now I want to do the depth of field depth of field is the way that the camera is going to focus on different elements of the shot if you have a really shallow depth of field objects closer to the camera or further away depending on where the focal point is are going to become a lot more blurry now for aerial aviation photography is unlikely we'd see a shallow depth of field because the photographer or the cameraman is going to have the f-stop up pretty high however we can still add a little bit and especially if we look later on in the shot maybe around frame 150 it would make sense for this part of the plane to be the focal point and the rest might begin to just get out of focus just ever so slightly so in order to do depth of field properly in after-effects it is a little bit tricky to do there is a plugin that takes a lot of the hassle out of this but there is a way to do what natively in After Effects so before we do that we're gonna go down to this plane beauty shot just noticed this needs to be at the top and we turn it off we don't usually need this plane beauty but we can just leave it there for reference later if you remember that the plane beauty is simply what was rendered from the frame buffer with all the passes already composited so we don't actually need this one so we'll just turn this off next we're going to go into the plane depth we're gonna make a copy of it click ctrl shift C or right-click and do pre compose move all attributes into the new composition double click this layer right now we're looking at just the z-depth now this needs a bit more contrast on it but right now we're going to add a background and the background we're gonna sample the color of the wing at the back end of the plane and place this layer underneath it kind of makes it look like the plane is coming through some fog here this is fine now the reason we have to do this is because without this layer the depth of field will stop wherever the plane stops and that's not how real focusing would work so we can't just single out separate objects otherwise it's not going to look correct pop back over to plane 2 and we're going to add a new adjustment layer underneath and call this depth of field and we'll be using two of these Z depth passes so we're going to rename this one as well we'll just call this DOF for depth of field so on the depth of field we're going to grab a camera lens blur effect all right so right away you'll notice that when we put on the camera lens blur effect everything is coated in same amount of blur so to change that and actually use that depth of field we're going to go into the blur map change the layer to be the plane z-depth duf and then we need to change this from source to effect some masks so we can put curves effects on this z-depth layer and then it will propagate those results through otherwise it will only look at the source zoom out here and I gotta crank this value up to be some ridiculous value just so we can see this very clearly now right away you'll notice that the edges look a little bit odd and that's because anything that's blurred up to the edge of a canvas since there are no pixels outside of it it's going to give this kind of effect so repeat edge pixels attempts to fix that next what we're going to do is select our planes eat up the UF layer turn it on so we can see what we're doing and then add a curves effect to it so we need to crush these black values quite a bit to really begin to see what we're doing we want the front end of the plane to be black and we do want to try to smooth out this transition we don't want there to be a hard edge here turn this lair back off and now you can see that this is currently in focus this part right here go into the depth of field and change our bluer focal distance we'll to start increasing the slightly and as we increase it is going to shift the position that's in focus so we're looking for maybe a value of around point one or maybe point zero five so it's more or less in the center there the rest looks absolutely ridiculous and not realistic at all but this was just so we could figure out what part isn't focused very clearly now we can drop the blur radius back down to something like five and this is going to look a lot more realistic so this part is in focus and then as we get further away from the plane it gets a little bit softer has more of a film look to it so it is reasonable to expect that the edges might get a little bit more blurred you know as lower this value if you want to but this looks pretty good another thing that you'll notice is that the clouds look a lot better so without the lens blur on we get a lot of artifacting from the pretty low sampling time that we had in V-Ray so by adding just a little bit of blur we kind of get rid of a lot of that without having to do a higher sampling rate now we will go ahead and do that because there's areas around here where it's is still far too grainy but for this large area background adding a little bit of blur it goes a long way in clearing that up I'm gonna rename this effect to be my depth of field the UF I'm also going to add a second camera lens blur effect underneath this and I'll put the value quite low at around 0.3 so it will coat the entire scene again and another layer of blur but it's going to add just a tad amount of blur here we might even lower that to point two just so it's not so sharp when we rerender we might also just lower this very slightly if you want to do at 4.5 or maybe 4 might look a little bit better now but also you need to check from different positions the further we get away from this the more out-of-focus it's going to appear by default so if we wanted to here if we go to the very end of the composition you'll notice that the plane is much darker so it's going to be far less blur on the front end of the plane that at the beginning the plane is quite bright so to make this image look a little bit better what we're gonna have to do is go into the z-depth lair and you'll notice that the background blends in with the tail and towards the end of the shot but at the beginning is really not bright enough so I'm gonna add a curves effect to this light gray solid at around frame 130 this appears to be pretty good maybe 140 I'm going to set a keyframe on the curves and I got to go to the very beginning and at the very beginning I'm just gonna crush these white values up so they're a bit brighter that kind of blends in a little bit better because we want to make sure the background is all always not really the focal point of this is always going to be the plane next we can pop back out to the main composition and you can see that now the plane is sticking out more the nose is always darker than the background okay then we can now turn this back off and then move on to the next part okay so now that my renders have finished I want to show you how we can easily import new files so up here we'll just start with the exhaust right click on exhaust go to replace footage with file we're going to navigate to the version 3 folder go to exhaust and you can see this is now being updated grab the plane do the same thing right click replace footage file at the plane see the plane has now been updated and then we're also going to do the sky as well is very very simple to import new versions of files and just screw up through this and just make sure everything looks pretty good I like the wing being brighter there I think that's going to be that's gonna be better and I like seeing underneath the plane - there's one last thing that we can do with the z-depth and that's going to be atmospheric perspective so atmospheric perspective is going to be if there is atmosphere or air between the viewer or the camera and the subject now further that distance is the more faded this subject is going to look because there's more atmosphere in the way so I could go into a whole lecture on this but I'm going to try to sum that up pretty quickly and we're going to control this again with z-depth so we're gonna leave z depth here but what we're gonna do next is turn off all of these passes except for GI so we just want to keep one of these on so we can work out one at a time and then just copy and paste the effects as we go up but we need to be able to see what we're doing just on one layer so we're looking for an effect called the set matte effect so the set matte effect is a way of being able to use a matte without having to put a track matte directly above the layer says we're going to be using this matte several times it's much more convenient to use the set in that effect we're gonna be using the plane z-depth layer and then for this we're again going to use effects and masks and we're going to be looking at the luminance channel so the bright values so when you do that you'll notice that the plane goes partially transparent if I were to solo this layer toggle the transparency grid you can see is more faded at the front than the back which is the opposite effect that we want so we'll go into the invert matte and now is more faded at the back so this might be a little bit too faded but for right now this is this is fine we can go and correct this in a moment but one thing that you will notice the way this effect works it is going to make the plane or faded so we're going to fix that in a moment but before we do that we're just going to select this set matte effect copy it and turn on these layers again and then we're going to paste each one of these passes we don't paste it on z-depth that is the matte we don't need to add anything there so this looks way too transparent right now so let's go up into our plane z-depth layer and add a curves effect well turn this on so we can see it more clearly the front end of the plane is going to need to be a lot darker so actually what we're gonna do here we're going to take this crush the black values maybe do something more like or like this for a plane this small you're not going to notice a huge amount of difference from the front end to the back end but if you had multiple planes in the shot you would probably want to do this a lot more on the planes in the distance but something like this will give us a really subtle effect but it should work pretty well so if we just look through different angles here we should be able to get a good read of how this is going to react so the further away the camera is the more faded it should be this is looking a little too faded though so we are going to need to crush the black values a bit more and reduce the contrast so right here it is looking a little faded but let's just go ahead and see what it looks like when it is composited let's turn this z2 flare off so we can see that there's that far too faded here but we can can fix that in a moment what we need to do now though is fix the fact that we can see through the background so to fix this we're gonna go down to our plane GI layer just duplicate that and move the duplicate underneath and then rename the duplicate to be plane matte so let's solo this layer so we can look at it unobstructed solo this layer and toggle off our transparency grid instead of using the GI layer here what we're going to use is the alpha so for our G and B we can just say alpha alpha alpha and then click OK we do not need a set matte effect so we can just delete it and now we're just left with an outline of the plane a faster alternative to this is to simply use a fill effect over whatever layer you have you can just do something like this to color it in that's perfectly fine so it's either change the extractor to be alpha only or fill it in turn this layer off and then next we're going to need a copy of our sky well duplicate the sky and place the sky right underneath the plane map and rename this layer to be sky blurred so the track matte on the sky blurred layer is going to be an alpha matte of the plane matte some of this and you can see that the background is now showing up in an outline of the plane so we need to blur the sky so I'll add a fast box blur and then for the blur radius we'll do a value of around 50 we will repeat edge pixels it we shouldn't actually ever get to the edge but just to put it on just always do it now we're only caring about averaged values here so as the plane moves through the sky is going to blur these values so if this is not blurred enough heat maybe increase this to a hundred because we're looking more for the average value turn this back off we got to go ahead and save this and also we need to save this to a version 3 file since we are using new frames it's a version 3 so too see if this z-depth is doing anything if we turn off the curves effect we can see how faded it is without the curves this looks pretty good so we're getting slightly more fading at the back than we are at the front this might be more evident at the beginning which it is it's we're quite a bit further away from the plane this looks a little bit silly though so what we're going to do to fix these frames at the beginning we're gonna grab another curves and we want to animate these curves turn this plane Zita flare on by frame 80 it looks like this part of the plane is pitch black so we'll set a keyframe there at the beginning we need to crush in the black values a bit more and then we'll lower these white values again something more like this quickie you so we can see the keyframes I'll select this key frame click f9 to ease it out this lair back off and this looks a little bit better go ahead and change these but we do want to make sure this is animated now unfortunately with curves it's very difficult to animate them between two keyframes so if you did want to go ahead and reanimate this you're gonna have to go to a key position that you've keyframed and then you can change them all right so this is beginning to look a lot better now there's just a few more things that we need to do and then I'm gonna go ahead and add some bloom to this so this next part I want to look at the lights and the wings so I'm going to take the self illumination layer solo this and I'm going to add a glow effect at the glow but lower the threshold and then we're going to just lower the opacity down to about 75% and I think that's gonna look a little bit more subtle another thing I'm noticing at the beginning of the shot the front of the plane is looking a little bit too blurred and this is because in version 3 we pulled the camera out quite a lot so the depth matte needs to be adjusted so we're going to go ahead and fix that as well so we're going to go back up to this plane z-depth comp double click and we animated a curves effect to try to match the background with the back of the plane we're just gonna tweak some of those values and make it blend a little bit more especially here and then at the very end we'll add another keyframe something more like that and then we'll add another curves effect and at around frame 70 I think this is looking pretty good we turn this back on well set a keyframe there and frame one we can barely see it anymore so we're gonna crush the black values here so the nose of the plane will begin to appear and we need that to be dark so the dark area indicates what is in focus so we can do something like that and as soon as we go back we can see this is gonna look a lot more InFocus okay so the next thing I want to do is just brighten up the background a little bit well go to our sky layer add a curves effect and boost the values of the sky and next we're gonna add some bloom now bloom is gonna be where the highlights glow this is often seen in film or with photography where brighter objects have kind of a glow to them often is overdone in games but it does give a nice visual effect and I'd like to add it to this plane I'm gonna try to find a better angle here towards the beginning of the shot and we're going to just take a copy of the beauty pass duplicate that does rename it to be bloom turn this layer on and then solo it so it's possible to do in after-effects which I'm going to show you here it's also possible to do in V-Ray as well so in V-Ray you can add bloom by going into the frame buffer selecting this icon down here and enabling the bloom layer effect now I have set these values to something that would make it show up by default it may not appear to do anything the most important effects to get it to work are going to be increasing the intensity and lowering the threshold you also probably want to turn off hardware acceleration because this often does cause problems at least in the times that I've used it and you can see around all the highlights of the plane we're getting this glow now this can be saved out as a render element or a pass so by selecting this going up to your passes you can select glare and you would get an effect like this now that's perfectly fine to go ahead and use this however I want to show you a way that we can do it in After Effects so we have this copy of the beauty pass and on this pass we're going to add a set in that effect now usually you don't use a set matte effect as the layer that it's on in this case is okay so we're just going to use itself so we're using the same layer I'm going to change it from alpha channel to luminance I'm going to grab a curves effect I'm gonna crush the black values and then boost some of the mid-tones back up next we're going to add a glow effect the standard glow effect does not have a realistic fall-off if I lower my threshold increase the radius it doesn't have a natural fall off it just stays pretty consistent there is an effect called real glow which does a much better job of this so if you can find this plugin I'm not sure if it's available anymore but it is a very good plugin it handles glow and bloom in a much more realistic way I'm sure there are other plugins as well however we're gonna want to work with this and get it to do what we need turn off the solo and I'm gonna set the mode to be screen now the difference between ad and screen is that ad will allow the addition of all the pixels on this layer and below to exceed 8-bit and enter high dynamic range where screen clamps the values at one by using screen you avoid clipping at least from the layer that you're blending so the layer itself is quite bright but if we were to compare this with ad we can see clear amounts of clipping here we're almost getting values of two by setting this back down to screen we're not getting such harsh results I am still gonna use a HDR highlight compression effect and I'm just gonna leave that on at a hundred percent for now alright so I'm pretty pleased with that I need to see this whole thing we rendered out to really know for certain but we only have two more things left to do that we can go ahead and render out final frames at this and after that render out the composition I mentioned earlier that I wanted to add some camera shake we're going to go ahead and do that really fast go up to here at a new null object now on the camera shake null object wouldn't add to slider effects click enter and we're going to rename the first one frequency and the second one is going to be intensity then we're going to duplicate both of these effects and on the second one we can just call it rotation we're gonna grab all of the layers underneath we're not going to grab the color correction or the vignette or the camera shake itself and then you can either use the pick whip and attach all of these layers to the camera shake layer or you can go into the parent link option and just select it this way next we're going to open up the position to click P hold down the Alt key and click the stopwatch for position and we're going to type in wiggle open parenthesis then take the pick whip and attach the first parameter to the slider control of frequency do a comma space and then take the pick whip again and grab the slider control for intensity so the wiggle effect it takes two parameters the first one is going to be frequency so how many times per second the value can wiggle or just move around and the second parameter is going to be how many pixels or how many units of whatever channel you're on can move so in this case we're using pixels because we're using a position transform then we can just click the numpad enter key and for the frequency we might try a value of around 2 and the intensity of around 10 and when we do this you'll notice perhaps even more if you increase the intensity so if we did something like 50 we'll notice that we're gonna get a border depending on the size of your intensity you will have to scale up this layer so I'm gonna hold down the shift key and click s to open up the scale and I'm going to increase the size of this null object by maybe 2% you'll have to scrub through and just make sure that that is consistent you might need to do a little bit more depending on what your intensity is next we're going to hold down shift and click R then we're going to add an expression to the rotation channel again we're going to be using wiggle and we can attach the first parameter to the frequency rotation comma and grab the intensity rotation then click the numpad enter key or just click off to the side now for rotation we wanted to do something that's really really subtle so I'll actually do 0.5 so it's going to be every two seconds and then for the intensity will only do a maximum of one degree and the reason we're using slider controls is so you can animate the camera shake if you were just to use these numbers directly in the wiggle function that's fine to do but there's no easy way to animate those values so if you put them in sliders you can control the values at any point just with basic key framing so throughout the animation this is going to kind of wobble around and with the rotation we will need to scale this up just a little bit more we're getting a little black edge there to be safe I'm just gonna say a hundred and five now earlier I mentioned that I needed to pull the camera out a little bit further because I knew that I was gonna have to scale in to always make sure that you don't have your subject touching the edges of the composition so you can always crop a little bit of the plate okay so I think that's gonna look pretty good when we render it now with a camera shake we are actually moving all of these layers and anytime you move anything in a perfects you need to add motion blur so we are going to select all of these layers and then we need to select the motion blur switch which is going to be this button here so we just line it up and then make sure that this switch is enabled for the cop this allows motion blur to be enabled everywhere and close that and we have one final adjustment to make going to go into layer new adjustment layer and we're going to add some film grain grain needs to go underneath your color correction and we're looking for an add grain effect by default you get this little preview window so you need to change the viewing mode to be final output and the default grain is is quite hideous so on the intensity we need to change the intensities at something like 0.1 and then the size also down to something like 0.1 this is supposed to be a very very subtle effect but in areas where there's shadow like in the intakes and in the cockpit cameras will always have even a little bit of grain and if everything in your plate is super clean this is going to look a little bit unrealistic so we're gonna maybe drop that down to point zero five and that looks that looks a bit better all right so now the only thing that we have to do is render out a higher quality version of just the plane so after adding the camera lens blur and adding the grain I think the quality of the plate is fine so we don't need to go ahead and render that out again so we need to pop back over to Maya I don't actually need to render bloom so I'm going to turn that off if you do render bloom you can do it as a separate pass and then you can choose to use it if you want to and close this down I up version this diversion for I'm going to go into our render settings do the same for our version label here then go into the V-Ray tab and change the max render time up to one minute now this is going to be dependent on your PC's hardware so one minute on a supercomputer is gonna be very different to one minute on a laptop it will be a lot better than just a six second render so a full minute is going to be it's gonna produce a much cleaner image we only need to render the plane there that's selected everything else looks fine and then we can go ahead and render this out I made one slight error here this plane bloom layer needs to be underneath our depth-of-field layer otherwise it's not going to blur in the same way but now we can go ahead and load in plane version 4 place the footage with the new plane version and a version our comp as well to version 4 and now we're ready to render the preview let's go over and rename our composition named composition settings this is now version 4 whatever this is would be your file name then we're going to go up to composition add to Adobe Media encoder queue this will launch the media encoder it might take a few seconds maybe even up to a minute to transfer this depending on the speed of your PC and if you have used the encoder before so if this doesn't load up right away don't panic next we're gonna click on h.264 and again this process can take a several seconds here you can change the format to something else but we're gonna leave that on h.264 gonna leave the output name the same all of the basic video settings these are going to be taken from the After Effects composition so if something is incorrect here you need to go back to After Effects fix it there and then send it back over we are going to render at maximum depth and for the bitrate we are going to use variable bitrate or v vr one pass there's not a huge amount of size difference between one pass and two paths but a to pass does take twice as long so on the target bitrate we're going to say 20 and then for the maximum we're gonna say 25 if you're rendering in 4k you would probably need to boost this the target should be around 40 and maybe the maximum around 50 but for 1080 this is fine then we're going to use the maximum render quality as well click OK and then click the green start button then I'll come and show you the final result here's the pretty be rendered out and this would be appropriate to send off for a client review I also have an alternate version of this I did a few years ago so you've got the wingman in there got a different HDR and the slightly different animation alright guys thank you so much for watching if you made it through all the videos I really really appreciate it the series took a lot of time and effort to put together so hope you guys think it's worthwhile or at least you learned something that you didn't before right so if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible otherwise I'll catch you in the next video peace you

Channel: CGStirk

Views: 37,285

Keywords: maya vfx, composite passes, EXR passes, Maya passes rendering, maya vray passes, render passes in maya vray, exr, composite EXR, visual effects tutorial, vfx compositing after effects, after effects tutorial, vray render passes tutorial, vfx tutorial, V-Ray, vray render passes, maya, vfx, visual effects, batch rendering, openexr, color correction, passes, lumetri color, hdr highlight compression, depth of field, maya camera, jet, tutorial, vfx after effects course, beginner, Intro

Id: qUTx8KSvyJ8

Length: 100min 27sec (6027 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020