Fly: Compositing

Once the animation was finished and rendered, it was the time to comp everything together.

To comp it I used Nuke.

First, I imported all of the renders and using ShuffleCopy node created new channels for each except the render with subsurface scattering passes. I comped them separately.

Then I added background sequence. I created the sequence in AfterEffects, as it gave me much quicker way of doing it. I just had to take into account the timing and when the fly sits on the bucket to synchronize it with the break. I used Copy node to still have an access to the channels I created earlier.

This is how the composition looked like at this point:

Then, using ColorCorrect and Merge nodes I added shadows, ambient occlusion and color corrected the fly.

This is result:

Once this was done I added subsurface scattering renders. I built new tree beside the old one and for this one instead of using ShuffleCopy nodes I used Merge nodes and set them to add. That will gave me the same result as the MasterBeauty. I also had to use specu;arity renders twice to strengthen the result.Once new tree was complete I merged it with the old one.

This is how it looked combined:

As you can see, I had huge premultiplication problem. The black outline got thicker and thicker with every new render.

To solve it I had to use Unpremult node after each sequence and change each sequence Color Space to Raw Data. With those changes the result was much better.

I had similar problem with shadows. I was getting white outline around them. This is because I used Multiply mode when merging them together. Once I changed the mode to Screen, the outline disappeared. but the shadow was bright, so I had to use Constant node with very dark color to fix that problem.

Lastly I added wing specularity. For some reason it didn't render with the other passes, so I had to create a separate render layer and render it on its own. Then I merged it exactly as I merged the subsurface scattering tree.