Need FEEDBACK on Lighting/Compositing Scene

[Richard Garabedain]

the robot looks great. and blends in very realistically. but the actor and the laser need a do over. and a 2d lightning effect in a 3d scene..cmon..you haven’t seen this website?….https://www.videocopilot.net/

[Steve Bentley]

A couple of things to try apart from general color grading:

First, depending on the screen your audience will be viewing this on, the black levels can change dramatically. And I find this is where you first get the creeping feeling that the shot is fake. So temporarily jack up your black levels on your monitor and you may see big differences in the black levels of the robot vs the surrounding plate. (you can also do this with the info box and dragging your pointer around checking shadow levels) but changing your monitors gamma will make it obvious. If you match these levels you won’t see a difference in the shot on your monitor set to normal but it will survive the hideously large array of gammas out there now that we all have LCDs.

Second sneak trick is to add a lens flare to the whole shot – even if you don’t need one. You can position it off screen and let it fog in to the viewing area. You can either position it so that the lens artifacts are not visible or you can turn them off if you have a pro version of a lens flare package (I don’t think you can turn them off in the AE built in lens flare).
This has the same result as above – it fills in the differences in levels and makes them come out all the same.
So it shouldn’t look like a lens flare or that there is a bright light somewhere, you are just adding it for the fogging effect. It also reduces the perfection that CGI renders always have.

[James Carver]

Hahaa…well thanks Richard. Yea videocopilot is where I got the tutorial and saber plugin for the laser.

The blast is a work in progress, but I wanted feedback on that too so thanks. My biggest challenge was the compositing of the robot…as far as the blast though do you think it’s not strong enough and needs to be more of an impact?

iMac 27\” Late 2013
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB

[James Carver]

Hey Steve thanks great tips…when you say jack up the black levels on my monitor how exactly would I do that on an iMac?

Also as far as the flare I totally get what you’re saying on that….I have the pro pack for optical flares so I can add that.

iMac 27\” Late 2013
32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
3.5 GHz Intel Core i7
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB

[Richard Garabedain]

Well the laser looks 2d..like its shooting from on top of the screen im looking at. I would use particle world tutorial where he (kramer) attaches the emitter to a null..And the explosion. forget the explosion..we are looking at a guys head…we cant see the ground or anything