Rendering and Post Processing

Firstly, I'd like to advise not to render projects the day before they are due. I painstakingly waited for hours as four of the university's computers sluggishly rendered my animation in Maya. I used the Mental Ray rendering software with production quality motion blur settings. Mental Ray seemed the be the best rendering software available for me to use and is great for creating cartoon style animations due to its heavily saturated colours and bright lighting. I regret leaving rendering to the last minute as I had planned to add a toon shader to the characters, but ran out of time.
Prior to this project, I had been rendering my frames to the targa file format, giving each of the frames a green background to key out in After effects. However, I learnt to render out to the PNG file format for an already transparent background. After hours of pacing and cursing the computers finished rendering and I moved onto post processing in Adobe After Effects.

Below is a screenshot of my project during its final steps before rendering in Adobe After Effects.



Once in After Effects I didn't need to do much other than place each animation scene on top of its respective video background and place in a few masks. Once all of the six scenes of my animation were all lined up properly in the timeline I used masks to cut out the characters and they came from or went behind walls and doors. Once this was all done I rendered the file out to the AVI file format, compressing it with the Xvid MPEG-4 codec. After watching this first render of the compiled VFX project, I realised it was playing through too fast. To fix this I just went back to the After Effects project and enabled time remapping. After adjusting it to the speed I desired I rendered it once again and that video is now ready for the final submission.

check out the final render at http://www.vimeo.com/16298300