Final Touches - Making My Reel Professional

I have been testing out different fonts and colours for my titles at the beginning and end of my demo reel. I have decided to make my titles in Maya because not only do I think they look more professional than 2D, it emphasises my favour towards CG rather than 2D animation.

I downloaded free fonts from dafont.com and used the text tool in Maya to create the words in CG. I then extruded the letters to emphasise the 3D look of them.

First font - although clear enough, the style doesn't suite the reel I have in my head at the moment

 

Second font - although more stylised, it isn't as clear as the one above and is too 'sci-fi' for my reel

Third font - I like the font because it's both clear and suits the animation style I have gone for in my reel. I also tested out colours but these are too dark for my reel.

Testing colours - I like the colours but I'm not too sure on how much white can be seen

I've moved some of the individual letters around to make it read better

Final titles (with basic lighting)

I want my reel to look as polished as possible so I've been playing around with different textures and lighting for my scenes. I've been careful with how much I've done and how long I've spent playing around with different settings because I don't have the luxury of time and don't want to distract the viewer from the animations themselves.

Here's a run down of what I've done to some of the scenes to make them look as good as possible.

Norman Sneak - the cameras have a default where anything not lit or textured is rendered as matte black. When I first rendered this animation with the default black 'background', it didn't stand out at all and with making Norman's texture really dark, to almost black, I couldn't see much of him except for where my three spot lights highlighted his features during the animation. I decided to change the camera environment colour (the colour at which it renders anything not lit or textured) to almost pure white. I didn't go for pure white since the title almost disappeared. I feel it works well but I might go back and change the colours of the title to make them stand out more.

I decided to render the animations I did for Edward Hudson's film, "Once Upon A Time In Leningrad" with just an Ambient Occlusion pass because I feel it looks really professional. Below are the settings I used for all 6 shots:

(Select everything needed to be rendered > Layer Editor > Render tab > Create New Layer From Selected > Presets > Occlusion)

Samples - 64

Spread - 1

Max. distance - 45

When rendering everything from After Effects and Maya, I was sure to render as TIFF sequences as to not lose quality and then saved each sequence in separate folders.

2D Robot Animation - Compositing

This morning I finished the robot animation and rendered the U.F.O animation from Maya.

 The robot

The U.F.O 

Here's the final edit with both the 2D robot animation and the 3D U.F.O animation composited together

To composite these together, I rendered both the robot and the U.F.O as TIFF sequences, in After Effects and Maya respectively, and then imported them in the timeline together in a separate composition in After Effects.