Using OpenEXR render passes in After Effects can be tricky, but this tutorial will provide you with the tips and tricks you need to perfect your next project.
As VFX artists, we are always looking to make our projects as real as possible. This week’s After Effects tutorial will provide you with a few quick tips on how to provide the best detail when compositing with OpenEXR render passes.
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My friend can see a magical 3D animated ball in the real world! Here I animated a little red ball that I made several render passes for. I made reflection passes, lighting, color, etc in addition to making the 3D perspective match the video of my friend, to merge the two worlds.
While doing the last milestone, I realized that the scene depth didn’t contrast very well between things in the foreground and things in the midground. It made it very difficult to effectively use the render pass to edit the background or add interesting elements to the animation in After Effects.
I spent 5 minutes setting up a basic scene with four cylinders, a wall, a floor, and a camera. I positioned the cylinders a short distance from each other and set up the camera to show each one.
With this I was aiming to test how effectively the scene depth was showing the distance between the objects. I rendered the scene and output this pass:
This wasn’t quite the output I wanted, and I spent another 30 minutes researching how to set custom depths and how to edit render passes in UE4. I turned up empty handed and tried something else, using the player controller to quickly hop into the world and see the size difference between the character and the cylinders.
The game controller looked about the same size as the player. So I did some more experimenting to change the size of everything so the depth would be more extreme. I also changed the FOV of the camera to keep the shot looking as consistent as possible with the previous experiments. This took about 30 minutes due to some bugs that showed up when trying to render the scene, I was unable to find why render passes were exporting at a low resolution, but after deleting the camera track and resetting it the render passes exported fine.
The scene depth pass created a better output this time, with enough contrast that I could use it in luma track maps with more effectiveness. This experiment would’ve helped in the previous milestone so I could’ve done something more interesting than an edited skybox and a blue fog. It will help any future milestones and projects with edits that involve depth.
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This week was based on render passes and using them to add an effect based on distance with After Effects.
Time Spent:
30 minutes spent on setting up the grey box
1 hour spent animating the camera and cylinder, working with the sequencer
1 hour spent in After Effects, adding the blue tinge to distant items and the video in the sky
30 minutes spent on the reflection
This week, as I started, I found I was a little rusty with my animation. Since I’d started experimenting before I did the milestone, I was familiar with the controls, and the animation is the only thing that took me longer than expected in UE4. I worked through it by spinning-top like animation I was planning with the falling animation I’ve done in the video. If I’d had more time, I would’ve have liked to work through the original animation idea and develop it to look how I imagined it.
I also had some issues with After Effects. Since I’d used it before I had some basic skill in using it but had trouble with the render passes. I worked with it for a while and kept confusing the luma and alpha passes with each other, ending up with a weird effect I had to fix several times so the blue tint and video wouldn’t be covered by each other. I learnt a lot in the process though, and figured out how to work with opacity and the alpha/luma channels to make a nice fog effect without completely covering the distant items.
Something I will have to learn after this milestone is how to change scene depth passes so I don’t continue to get really low contrast renders where they become nearly unusable.
Final Image - World Normal - Scene Depth - Specular - Lighting Model - Ambient Occlusion
here is one frame from each of the render passes that i render out of unreal. i had absolutely no idea which passes to do so i just made my best efforts to guess which ones to do. for about 2 hrs i experimented with each and every one of these passes in after affects seeing how they could be used and what affect they had on each other, as to see which ones would be best suited for the final composite. i ended up using 4 of the passes in the final composite
These frames are all from the same scene but rendered out into different render passes.
The first one is the final product with lighting and shadowing
the second picture is nothing all 2-dimensional due to the lack of lighting and shadows.
The last image is shows the depth of the scene, it’s harder to see considering the scene that this was shot was within a small space and not showing too much depth.
