Rendering and compositing

I had originally planned to do all of the composition for the film. However due to time restrictions i had to get help in this area. I therefore only ended up comping one scene, This was just putting the hand with the pan in over the underwater scene.

(See animation folder.)

The shot was orgininlly designed so that the hand would go behind the plants on the left of the screen.

However when rendering layers i found that the colours had changed on the front plants. This was due to the way the scene was set up, to mimic the reflections and refractions under the water.

The colour change was too drastic from the rest of the scene and would not have looked good at all.










The only way around this problem was to keep the front plants in a layer with the rest of the scene and  move the Hand away from the plants. By having it here, i could still show the illusion of the hand being in the water,

It would however have been better to get the plants to be in front of the hand. This would have show a better sense of depth.



When rendering my final shots, i mde sure that all the scenes had their own ambient occlusion. This would highlight the models better and help show detail. This was achieved by setting up render layers.

I mainly stuck to two main ones per shot, With that being beauty and ambient occlusion.

No Ambient Occlusion








With Ambient Occlusion








I would sometimes add extra layers, but this was only to sepate the layers in whcih characters would be on.

I did not really see much nbenifit in having several render passes. This was mainly due to my film being cartoony. I have found in the past that the render passes can be very affective when trying to achive photo real result as you can have more control of the final images. This was not neccessary for my film though.