setting the scene

Now that the animating is done (as you can see from the playblast from maya in the last post) i will now start the not so fun part before rendering.

Its all part of setting the scene, i messed about with the lighting, standard phong materials for characters, with reduced reflection and set up multipaths render with.

twiddled with colour paths, shadow paths, beauty path wasnt needed because ill; be compositing it.
paths are one of the main reasons maya was the better choice to animate and render in than max, it allowed alot more freedom when it came to layers and render paths.

i could independently composite layers individually, rather than a beauty layer which give me more freedom with the final look i think.
unlike in max, the layers are called paths, which i found the most confusing when researching, following and building on tutorials.

to composite images together in after effects i exported them all out in PNGs and then transferred them over to a new project and composition.
I fiddeled about with it but essentially i created a fast blur for shadows, did some colour grading, then a motion blur to take the ridgedness out of the animation and i increased frame padding.

All together it really started to come to together nicely, and i could finally start breathing again as editing it all in after effects took a substantial amount of time.