Major Project 16 - Drone Compositing

I am really pleased with all the finished animation of the drones. I believe they all came out really nicely. I managed to finish off rendering all shots over the easter break which worked really well as the space was empty. This let me render all day and night on many computers. 

The renders have mostly come out nicely, the textures really add a great amount of realism, roughness map especially. The main issue with these is that most shots are too shiny. Since I had rendered with AOV render passes, I thought this would be easily fixable. But when I started attempting to combine these renders passes, I found the results didn't come out as nice as the beauty pass. Dimming the amount of reflection also only changed how much reflectivity there was, not the diffusion. I experimented playing around with blurs and mattes to create the same effect, but it was quite a long winded way of making little difference. 

In the end, what I have done most of the time is just dim the whites in colour correction to at least make the specularity less noticeable. The only AOV pass that I really used was the emission pass for create glows and lens flares from the lights on the drone. This has gone well and also grounds the drones into the scene. 



I am happy with the composite of most shots, usually involving colour correction to bring down contrast and raise the blacks a bit. Then I slightly blur to match the footage, some shots have focus shifts where I have used camera lens blur to achieve this and match the anamorphic lens effect I achieved with the filter. 

If I have time, I plan to swap out these renders for slightly more diffused renders. This is something I can do pretty easily but it is a shame that I have to.