Render Passes/Layers

Achieving Realism and Depth using Render Layers in Maya - CG Tuts

Depth pass rendered out from Maya

Depth pass brought into After Effect

Ambient Occlusion pass brought into After Effect

Colour/Beauty pass brought into After Effect

Above images are from CG Tuts, which described in detail how to bring all the separated render passes from Maya back together using After Effect. This gave me a clear understanding of how to gather each pass together efficiently, which avoids going back and render from Maya time comsumingly, and also increase the quality of the final output.

Rendering in Passes/Layers - The Gnomon Workshop

Above image is an example used by Alex Alvarez to demonstrate the meaning and use of various render passes.

Above image demonstrates the tremendous level of controls gained over the scene at the compositing stage via rendering each scene element out separately using render passes.

This website provides detailed explanation over several commonly used render passes, Diffuse and Specular for example, as well as how to separate various elements in the scene to create the maximum level of controls over our scene by being able to colour-grade and edit each element individually.

Below images are the renders layers for frame 290 of our submission piece from renderfarm.

Clouds in the front

Clouds in the back

Ocean

Fog

Seafort 01

Seafort 02

Seafort 03

Seafort 04

Seafort 05

Seafort 06

Seafort 07

OcclusionPass

AlphaPass

ReflectionPass

ShadowPass

zDepthPass

Above images represent a test that I did in photoshop in order to figure out how to use the zdepth information generated from Maya to apply depth of field effects to 2D images.

I composited all the layers together in After Effect as the image shown above. Due to the textures resolution being too high, we had to render each seaforts out separately, this however created the problem of seaforts over lapping whenever the camera rotates around because they were all rendered out in the alpha channel. The alpha mask with all the seaforts would not solve this problem. As a result, I went back to Maya and created an alpha mask layer for each seaforts and rendered them out with renderfarm and it worked. There was only one bit when the camera rotates to the exact opposite direction from its original path, then the alpha mask had worked oppositely so the seaforts were overlapped. We only discovered it after we rendered it out and there was no time for us to do another render unfortunately. Apart from that everything else worked greatly for the first scene.

For the intro, we had Jure modeled the TV and had Ladji textured it. Then I replaced the TV plane texture with a green lambert shader so we can easily key out the screen in After Effect and place the footage of our first shot behind it, and use After Effect's 'Track Motion' utility to keep the main comp on the TV.

When the camera goes through the main seafort window, we planned to extend the camera path into the room and render them out separately. Again, we didn't have enough time to do that due to all the problems occurred previously, so I rendered out an alpha mask from the last frame of the shot and use that to composite the renders of the room behind it.

After all the compositing in After Effect, I exported everything and edited them all in Final Cut Pro together with the soundtracks and sound effects.