After Effect Tutorial : Compositing Basics

This After Effect tutorial is a continuation of the “VIllus Capillary” tutorial where you went through the basics of creating a Maya scene from A-to-Z. You’re now ready to stitch together a final movie from the individual sequences of images that were rendered in Maya. In addition to simply ‘stitching’ the sequences together, we will explore a few different compositing tasks as well.

For example, there are benefits to rendering a single image/shot into multiple ‘render passes’ where different elements of the scene are separated out onto different layers and rendered independently with an alpha channel (i.e. transparency information). These passes need to be overlaid and blended together in ‘post’ (i.e. in a compositing package like After Effects). With this extra step you gain additional control over processes that would otherwise take longer to render ‘in camera’ (i.e. in your 3D package). We will composite together one of the sequences from your movie in order to add fake depth-of-field effects (i.e. blurring), a process that can be tricky and processor-intensive at render time in Maya.

Download After Effects Tutorial : Compositing Basics PDF File here!