Compositing Test

To make my first shot more interesting I decided to add more than one spaceship into the scene. I began with masking out the foreground and background sections in order for me to be able to place the maya sequences in between the two. Our original footage, the sky was quite grey and bland so I thought it would be nicer if there was a blue sky, again this was just done by masking out the certain area and I used a sky texture from cgtextures.com. To begin with the sky was too vibrant so created a ramp and an adjustment layer to counteract this. I also had to do some colour correction on the actual shot itself for it to be more of a seamless integration.

As I will be using a shot as a image plane within Maya, (to line up the animation so I know what's going where and how fast it will be travelling across the screen) I placed just two coloured solids into the shot so I would get the basic layout of where I wanted the spaceships to be / their ending position. From here I rendered out one frame and attached it to a new camera in Maya. Using this image as reference I then animated a few spheres adding fur to one of them to get an idea of what it would look like. The lighting still needs some work, at the minute there is 3 point lighting on it but the intensities may need some adjusting, especially around the edges of the fur ball. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I had issues with making the fur dynamic, in the way that the fur would always pierce through the geometry even though a collider was set to it. Apparently this can't really be solved the only way around it is for the object to be moving really slowly which would reduce the risk of the fur going through the geo. It was suggested to me that a way I could possibly get around this is by setting out the animation how I would like it within Maya, then applying the fur, slowing it down to where the fur doesn't puncture the geometry and then try speeding it up within After Effects. In theory this should work but I would need to test it out first, speeding up clips can sometimes create interlacing in the footage, depending on how much you speed it up by.