Smoke - After Effects

There are a couple of shots in my animation where my dragon takes off with a jetpack and soars through the sky. I knew I wanted to have a smoke effect in these shots, especially when it goes wrong as this will be more of a visual cue. I tried to use particle emitters in Maya however I couldn't get a good result and I knew that it would also increase the render time by a significant amount. Instead I decided to use After Effects and I made use of Trapcode Particular to create a smoke effect. First of all I created a black solid layer and used the preset smoke within tapcode to apply onto the solid. This already had a preset animation but I deleted this and animated it so that it would follow the jetpack. I also adjusted different settings such as the opacity and lifespan of the particles.

When it came to the jetpack failing, I wanted the smoke to turn black and for flames to emerge. To get this effect, I animated the colour of the smoke to turn a dark grey/black and then on top of this I added a flame preset. Again I adjusted certain attributes and animated it how I wanted. There were a few things that weren't to my liking, when the flame first emerged there was a black smog at the bottom. This didn't seem very appealing or natural to me so I erased this out within After Effects. I've never used this before and it came in quite handy, you can also use the clone stamp tool, the same as you would in Photoshop. I was able to create a more desired effect this way and in a quicker time too. I'm quite happy with how this has turned out, I would have liked to have spent more time on this and explore different techniques, but for now it does a decent job. I may come back to it at another time and see if I can improve on it anymore.

Sky Replacement

When we filmed out on location, the sky was very grey and bland, so I decided to create a sky replacement to make it more interesting and visually appealing. I had already done a basic one on a test of the first shot awhile back but now I thought it would be better to advance this and create something I was more happy with. I wanted the sky to change colour as the spaceships came into view and I came across this tutorial which proved to be really useful. I took what I learnt here, about adjustment layers and the use of CC Rain and CC Mr. Mercury to create a comp that pushed my skills further.

I took the basics and adapted it to suit my comp. In the first shot I keyframed the different types of colour correction I used on the adjustment layer and sky layer, in order to achieve a gradual change in colour when the ships appeared. Because I did this to the first shot, I also had to do the same on the other two shots after it for continuity. The edit below is not finished at all, there are still tweaks I need to do on the compositing, especially changing the rain effect. Even though it was quite visible when I first made it, it could do with increasing in size so it is slightly more visible to the eye, at the minute it blends too well into the background and the droplets are too thin. Obviously as well, my animation isn't fully rendered, these are just playblasts. It's just in this stage at the minute as I have to send this off to John Waugh, the guy who has offered to do my music for me and the main thing that he needs is for the timing of each shot to be how it is when it is fully finished.