The Last Stage: Compositing

After rendering out all of my scenes, I needed to bring all of my rendered tiff files and composite them as a sequence with the appropriate music.

But one more thing was required. From my lighting in Maya, I achieved an 80-85% effect that I wanted. Now I wanted to finish the rest off in After Effects. As you can recall, I wanted the room to seem desolate at the beginning of the animation, dark, and colourless. By the end of the animation I wanted it seem bright and very well lit. Instead of trying to do this directly in Maya- where the exact lighting can be very difficult to achieve, I could get an equivalent result in a much quicker time in a compositing package.

I found felt that the lighting for for the ending was very close to what I wanted, where as the beginning seemed far too bright- the animation needed more contrast. I did this by creating and keyframing a colour grading effect which gradually allowed the colours to saturate over time, giving the overall contrast to the animation.

Here is a screen shot to demonstrate the difference between the initial frame with a relatively simple colour grading effect that would be very difficult to achieve an Maya alone.


The bottom right shows the colour from the original maya render. The top left shows the colour graded version which is desaturated with colour corrections in After Effects.

After finishing the final touches to the composition, the final video was finally placed with the music and then ready to be rendered as a final piece.