Introduction

It never stops amazing me what you can achieve with modern day special effects and computer graphics tools. I would have normally done a scene like this in Autodesk's 3DS Max because of the complexity involved. It would have looked great at the cost of a couple of days of rendering. When you have a single machine to do your work on and render this is not always practical.

After Effects To The Rescue

Adobe After Effects CC does have native support for 3D objects via a lite version of Cinema 4D it only goes so far. Plus you have to know how to use Cinema 4D. I already have had to learn so many packages to do my daily work adding another one is really not in the cards unless I have too.

Element 3D

There is a phenomenal plugin for After Effects called Element 3D from the wizards at Video Copilot. Video Copilot is master minded by Andrew Kramer who is a really talented visual effects designer. His work can be seen on the big screen in movies like. Star Wars The Force Awakens.

Element 3D has several benefits. To start it is fast. Remember the several days of render time that I mentioned earlier? E3D managed to render the scene above in about 7 hours. It does this because it uses my [Nvidia] (http://www.nvidia.com/) graphics card to render instead of the CPU. This results in a great increase in speed. It also allows for something called a world position pass. This is sort of a mask in the scene that allows you to accurately place composited layers of live action into the scene and have it tide to the actual position that it would be placed at in the Element 3D scene. In this case the steam that is in this scene is done this way. Without it it would be hard to get the steam anchored down. The downside to using this plugin is that you are limited by the sized of memory on your video card. I have no idea how actually close I am to running out but this scene has to be pushing that limit. Most of the textures are physically accurate. This means that the light behaves pretty close to how materials work in real life. It adds an extra dimension to the production.

Color Correction For Mood

The initial pass from above was how the shot looked coming right out of After Effects with no color processing or effects. Color Correction is a process that helps to adjust the color and the lighting in a scene. Color correction helps to give depth, style, and enhance the mood of a scene. So where the first version was interesting it was enhanced to give a couple of different looks and feelings.

This scene is shifted towards the blue spectrum and there are adjustments to the contrast and brightness. This helps to give a stylized mood to the scene. In Blade Runner the setting is a dystopian world where the future has a dingy almost film noir feel.

In this version the color is pushed to the green side of things and some lens artifacts were placed in to give it a sense of altered reality. This sort of green shift and lens work is similar to what has been done in The Matrix.

Movies are not the only type of production that uses color correction (also known ask color grading). Most high end production has some color grading to it. Rarely when we watch these productions are we seeing the raw camera image.