[Vgta]

Well I bought the Final Fantasy DVD and while I loved the movie I liked the extra features even more. So here is my question, on the DVD they showed how they rendered and layered each shot independently and then composited it back together. Anyone know where I can find more resources as to how they do this?
I'm using Max R4 but I guess any reference would do.
Thanks.

[StrangeFate]

hmmm it's probably O/T for you but Mullins released some of his stuff for the FF movie
http://66.8.163.190/hirez_pgs/ff/ff.htm

there's some info about the scenery models used etc but i t hink it's not really what you're looking for.

[Anthony]

I posted a thread with a scene I made using a similar technique to what I think you're describing(http://www.sijun.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=002180)
Basically I had the background matte painting, then made a fairly detailed 3d set of plants and trees and things that I made. I saved out a scrolling rendering of this with the camera move I wanted. I then took a wide angle render of the whole foreground and painted over the geometry, creating more detail, getting the colors I wanted, etc. Then, in the 3d program, I used sticky camera projection mapping on the scene, which got a nice, painterly 3d scene that scrolls. A special program was made for this technique for Tarzan.Throw a few closeups and far pieces in the compositor, scrolling them at the right speed with the camera, and it should be good.

[Vgta]

Hey guys that's pretty cool and almost what I was looking for. It does help though.
I guess I could have made it a bit clearer too. On the DVD they show how they reneder each scene as separate pieces,
the models, then the lights, then the volumetric effects etc...so that is more or less what I am looking for. How do they composite each of these shots together.

Oh and Anthony, best of luck on your project man, looking great.

[jcFIG]

Regarding Tarzan, my teacher was a background painter and he worked on one of those scenes with the trees. He said they where using deepPaint and they where painting directly on geometry. Everything they painted became geometry.

[Anthony]

Try going to dvgarage.com and checking out their tutorials, they deal with this pretty well!

[Daniel Lieske]

That�s no great deal. Just render the parts independently, save them and use a compositing software to recombine them to one picture.
A little exercise you could try to understand the concept behind compositing would be to create a simple 3D scene (like a cube, a sphere and a cylinder on a plane). Then setup three lightsources in the scene. Render the scene three times with only one lightsource activated in each rendering. Take the three rendered images into ONE photoshop file (in different layers)and switch the blending modes of the layers from "normal" to "screen" (be sure to have a black background under your three layers!).
You will now see, that the scene looks as you have rendered it with all three lightsources activated. Now you can easily manipulate each lightsource�s intensity by just changing the layer�s opacity.
See?
You can rapidely change the scenes lighting without having to render more shots (as long as you don�t want to change light positions...).
You can apply this concept to nearly every aspect of a rendered image: reflections, specular highlights, diffuse color (note that you can change the lightcolor in the above example only by doing a hue-shift on one of the layers!).
And you are not limited to still images. You may render every aspect of your animation as a seperate image sequence. In programms like Adobe After Effects you can recombine this sequences to composites.
A nice book on this topic is "The Art and Science of Digital Compositing" by Ron Brinkmann ISBN 0-12-133960-2

[ October 30, 2001: Message edited by: Daniel Lieske ]

[wahookah]

the keyword you are looking for is "multipass rendering"

you simply render shadows, highlights, z-depth, reflection, etc... seperately in order to have more control over the image in the compositing process...

there�s an option in max that does exactely this kind of thing:

it can be found in the rendering options under "rendering elements":

simply choose the passes that should be exported, voila...

[Vgta]

Awesome!!!

Thank you guys, definitely got all of the basic info I was looking for.

Thanks again.

[TheArtist]

Ok first of all when compositing 3D stuff onto something else when you have to deal with animation is to understand alpha channels.
When you render a scene in max enable the alpha channels(video post) and render it out in a sequence .TGA format or .TIFF format, these file formats preserve the alpha channel.
Now, you want these characters animated in a scene you rendered before.
Go into adobe after effects(AE) and import your back ground that you rendered before(no aplha channels used yet).
Then on a new layer import your character/smoke or whatever you want to put on there and just put it over your background.
And here's where the magic happens, because you rendered with alpha channels in max, adobe after effects understands it should only put your character in the background and not the entire picture.
An alpha channel is a map that actually gives shows how opace(opacity) something is.(from white to black).
So you can also import glass with alpha channels or smoke and you will be able to look through it, because of the alpha channels.
Now here's the tricky part, glass isn't only opace, it's also refractive, light is most of the time fully opace(not volumetric light), so it wont give an aplha channel in .TGA or TIFF format when rendered.
To preserve the refractiveness, you have to render out in a different file format.(but i forgot the name of it, haven't got max here at hand).
Now say you made a dark house that you made before as background.
You want to lighten it up, youcan do that in max directly or you can compostie the light over the dark house to lighten it up or to give a very customised effect.
That's how it works.
First learn more about alpha channels in max, they're a bit different from those of photoshop.(max has more complex ones)
That's it good luck.

[ December 09, 2001: Message edited by: TheArtist ]

[Catfish]

I use Maya Fusion for compositing.

If you want to pay shitloads, then Shake is very, very nice.

If you want to pay less, and have some slightly less specific functionality, Adobe After Effects is quite nice.

[Highfive]

TheArtist, are you saying there's a file-format that actually records refractive information? If you are, I'd love to know what it is!

[TheArtist]

Yes there is, but i forgot the file type.
I'll check out which one it was after i get home.
Remember the bullet trails in the matrix?
It was done with the same format.

[ December 10, 2001: Message edited by: TheArtist ]