6 Monsters

So our section of “Six Monsters” is finally finished, and if you haven’t yet noticed, it’s all 3D. It was a long hard slog, but it’s done.

I had made a post a while back that showed how a shot is broken down into it’s various elements for compositing, and that post disappeared somehow, so here’s my second shot at it. This is a quick version of how our renders work. We break things down into seperate render layers or passes. Why so many passes? Well, it gives us more control during the composite to control the various elements. If we need to re-run Buck’s layer, we won’t have to calculate all the rest of the things in the scene.

We start by rendering out a Beauty Pass. This pass has a lot of stuff in it. Gailard, the bottle, the background, etc. You can see Buck’s reflection in the fountain, but where’s Buck? Well, he’s got a lot of fur, so we save him for a seperate pass.

Here’s Buck now. He’s got a lot of fur - over 350,000 hairs.

This is an RGB matte. We render this so we can isolate different things in a frame. The purpose of this matte was to get something so that we could select Gailard’s glowing bits.

So we select Gailard’s glowing bits from the beauty pass, and then make a new layer with just those in there. We then blur that layer just a bit, and use a lightening blending mode on that layer. It give Gailard just enough of a spectral look so that he doesn’t get confused with a balloon or something.

This pass is called an Ambient Occlusion or AO pass. Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion. This gets put on top of the beauty pass and a multiply blending mode is used to strengthen shadows.

and HERE is the final result.
-Floyd Bishop