I thought I’d share some handy basic After Effects compositing tips I learned whilst doing one of my last Animation Mentor assignments a while ago. First off though I’m not a professional compositor but I’ve picked up these little tips along the way and I think they’re really useful, particularly for students. The idea here isn’t to go through step by step how to comp a shot, but rather how to add just a few sweeteners on top.
Blending animation with aliased footage:
Ok so most likely you’ll be compositing your animation into DV or or some other sort of lossy footage, such as the sort you get off a digital stills camera. You’ll notice that the footage has an almost jpeg-like quality to it (aliased) whereas your lovingly rendered animation will look pin sharp. The easiest way around this is to first not render at full resolution (I used about 3/4 the size of the footage) and drop the “mosaic” and “fast blur” effect onto your animation very slightly to add a little imperfection.
Colour Saturation:
Drop the colour saturation just a fraction, this will help your animation to blend in a little more.
Realistic lighting:
Ok so this is a very simple version of a really complex area that I don’t know much about but to easily get some nicer lighting to your shot, take a 360 photo of your location and use that as an HDR light source in your 3D package. If you weren’t on location for your shoot, just using a still frame from the footage will work to an extent too. Obviously this isn’t very precise but it will help! Also if it was shot on a bright sunny day don’t forget to add in a directional light to simulate the sun.
That blown out sky:
It’s very common that your location will look great apart from the sky which can end up over exposed or just white because of an overcast day. In After Effects use the “Luma Key” effect to key out the white sky and drop in a photo of a nicer one. Of course if you have a moving shot you’ll have to use a motion track to keep it locked down.
A few extras:
If you haven’t discovered it yet check out “Action Essentials 2″ from Video Co-Pilot. It’s great for adding a little atmosphere to a scene or little puffs of dirt for a dragon’s foot step, for example.
Also check out RealSmart Motion Blur, which is a 2D motion blur plugin for After Effects. I find this extremely useful as Maya’s motion blur adds so much time to a render.
Hope that helps, obviously you can go into huge amounts of depth with any of these ideas but animation is what you should be focusing on when you’re a student, but if you want to render out your shots these quick tips will really help your animation blend in a little better with minimal extra time.
Of course if you have any other tips yourself feel free to share and I’ll add them to the list!
All the best!
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