Advanced Compositing Workflows in Maya and After Effects
In this series of lessons, we will be taking you through the process of rendering your Maya scene into multiple passes, and using some advanced techniques for compositing these passes using After Effects. Software required: Maya 2009 and After Effects CS4.
What you'll learn
In this series of lessons, we will be taking you through the process of rendering your Maya scene into multiple passes and using some advanced techniques for compositing these passes using After Effects. We will dedicate the first portion of this course to using render passes in Maya to separate various elements of our scene at render time. We'll use mental ray's render passes, contribution maps, custom framebuffers, and render layers to create the necessary render passes for our scene. In the second portion of this course, we will begin with some quick compositing similar to our Compositing 3D Renders in After Effects course, but we will quickly get into more advanced topics such as basic and advanced depth-of-field, proxies, spot-paint-fixing and chromatic aberration. Software required: Maya 2009 and After Effects CS4.
Table of contents
- Importing Our Render Passes and Creating Proxies 8m
- Using Blending Modes to Composite Our Ant 6m
- Color-correcting Various Passes with Effects and Masks 7m
- Creating a Lightwrap to Tie the Foreground to the Background 5m
- Tweaking Our Matte to Remove a Black Outline 8m
- Painting Our Matte Image to Fix Issues with the Feet 7m
- Setting up a Basic Depth-of-field Effect Using the Depth Pass and Color Correct 9m
- Adding to Our Depth-of-field with Another Blur Effect 9m
- Adding Depth-of-field to the Background 6m
- Fixing Haloing by Extending the Depth with a Basic Minimax 6m
- Advanced Minimax Layering to Correctly Extend the Depth 8m
- Using an Expression to Simplify the Minimax Layering 6m
- Fixing the Depth Matte and the Ant Matte to Remove DoF Errors 7m
- Adding Chromatic Aberration to Our Image 5m
- Adding and Tweaking Grain for That Final Level of Detail 7m
About the authors
Kyle was one of the first authors for Digital-Tutors, now a Pluralsight company. and has been a part of the team for over 10 years. Kyle began his career in computer graphics education as a college instructor and worked as a Digital-Tutors rendering tutor and curriculum manager since 2002. Kyle has contributed to many of the most popular projects and helped the Digital-Tutors team win awards throughout the company's history. Kyle has had the honor of having his art exhibited at the New York ... more
Along with creating and recording training, he also used to manage the support team and work closely with the production development team at Digital-Tutors, now a Pluralsight company. He began his career working freelance and quickly realized that he wanted to find a company where he could use his talents to help people succeed in the CG industry. Chris has likely watched more Pluralsight creative training than anyone on the planet, and its evidenced by his Einstein-sized brain and encyclopedic... more