Weeks 33 & 34: The End has Come
- Andrea Krebbers
- Apr 26, 2023
- 4 min read
The last two weeks of my production were insanely busy, as I was bouncing around between different buildings/places rendering. I was rendering constantly on one computer in the computer lab, then rendering using Team Render with the servers in another building on campus (which thankfully Ben helped me figure out and set up, and made my life so much easier!), and then constantly rendering on my laptop while working and overnight.
Despite all of this, rendering still took an inordinate amount of time due to the length and complexity of my film, especially since I had to render everything out with multiple passes for the sky, background, characters, and shading. As such, for many of my still shots (that did not involve camera movement) I wound up rendering out everything separately: I'd render out my still background first, since rendering that was what took up most of the render time, then render out each character and their animation separately, along with a separate Ambient Occlusion (shadow) pass. While this created multiple PNG sequences when rendering, and it meant I had to spend more time compositing all of my backgrounds and character animations together, it drastically reduced my render times, so I was able to finish rendering everything out in less than two weeks!
As everything was rendering on all of these machines, I worked on two primary things: creating backdrops for my distant backgrounds/sky, and polishing and incorporating all of my VFX with my rendered shots as they came out. As you can notice from the above background shot, the HDRI maps for the sky still showed up in the renders, which feel removed from the environment. As such, I created several different backdrops for each shot/scene to add behind the trees and make the environment feel more complete. To save time, I created just a few basic environments, then imported their Photoshop files into After Effects so I could edit them as needed inside of AE when I composited everything together. Since I rendered out my backgrounds with Object Buffers, I could easily use the Track Mattes in After Effects to add in these backgrounds, so this part (while tedious, as it had to be used for each shot) was actually pretty quick! I then added color corrections/effects as needed to the background in After Effects to really make everything blend together more seamlessly.
With this compositing, I also added my polished VFX to the shots! Since I'd originally made the VFX a few weeks ago based on my polished animations, adding them in was actually pretty simple, as I just had to bring them into the new compositing project in After Effects and then did minor adjustments for keying and color/lighting on the characters to make it all feel more connected! This all happened with the background and animation compositing with each shot, so while things were rendering, compositing was happening simultaneously, which allowed me to actually be quite productive in the final days of creating my film.
Once this was done, and I'd begun to compile all of my finished shots into Premiere Pro (the final destination and compilation of my project), I had one last task to complete, which was finishing my 2D shots. Followers of this project will recall I had some 2D flashback shots that I'd been working on for this film, and I did in fact finish drawing these shots. However, my plan for these was to bring them into After Effects, isolate the layers, then set them all up with the 3D camera to give each of these shots a slight animation and more visual interest. Since I had time, I did polish up a few of these shots to make things more legible (and based on some recent critique), but with all of this setup, I imported the 2D shots into After Effects and began setting up their layers using the 3D camera in After Effects. This allowed me to simply animate the camera moving rather than keying all of these individual layers, which made animating them a lot faster. Some had more dramatic camera movements than others, but all in all the effect on them makes them feel much better than just still shots!
After adding these subtle camera movements to my 2D shots, I added them into my final film compiling in Premiere Pro, and added final color/timing touches to the shots that needed it (primarily Curves and Brightness/Contrast). After this, I added in my audio (which my lovely friend Amanda made already timed to my film, so all I had to do was drag and drop it into Premiere with the rest of the film).
With all of my rendered shots in and added into the sequence, I finally rendered out the final film! It did all feel rather rushed since it was done so quickly and it felt odd not working in 3D anymore despite having worked in 3D for so long in this film, but it's been incredibly rewarding to see the final result! I may add a more in-depth retrospective when I post the final film, but for now, I'm taking a well-earned break after working on this project for over a year!
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