

STEREO COMPOSITOR FULL
This is probably the best reason to use any kind of compositing in a full CG movie. You don’t spend any time or energy in set dressing or animation when elements are out-of-focus. If the DOF is set in layout, like on Lego Batman, it can save tons of work for other departments. I would like to add that 3d DOF can be a time and money saver. Chromatic aberration, lens distortion, lens breathing, glow and flares are ( almost) never rendered in 3d.Īll these choices really depend on budget, time and culture. In some render engines like Arnold, depth-of-field (DOF) or denoising can be expensive and it may be cheaper to run them in comp, although it is debatable. Even if Katana or Guerilla have this feature.
STEREO COMPOSITOR SOFTWARE
If you are rendering separated passes, like beauty, haze and volumetric, you’ll obviously need a compositing software to merge them back together. If you work in an ACES workflow, you may want to deliver in ACES2065-1 (AP0) which is not recommended directly from the render engine. I can guarantee this : there will be animation notes until final delivery. Any source of light with animated exposure or color during the shot should be kept as an LPE.

Or during the Digital Intermediate ( DI). It is easy to lose track on a feature and any colorimetric discrepancies should be fixed in compositing. Some stylized effects between shots can be asked and should be done in compositing. We’d rather use a ST map setup in compositing. We avoid rendering the shot for each country if some writing is present. 2d projections on a card or a sphere can be really useful and accurate. Not an ideal solution because of stereo compositing but it can be a life saver too. Grading.Exposure adjustments, gamma and saturation are generally done in a compositing software.Feast and Spider-man had a massive use of Nuke to get their amazing look. There is probably some middle ground to find here. I have seen both cultures : some studios just love heavy compositing work to avoid any extra rendering and some VFX supervisors just want to nail it in 3d to avoid any compositing tweaks. If your art direction is based and planned on compositing, like Spiderverse, it may look perfectly fine. Please note the use of the verb “ compensate“.
STEREO COMPOSITOR MOVIE
Rule of thumb is the more you leave to compensate in comp, the cheaper the movie will tend to look. It is all about the desired flexibility later down the pipe. All the things we do not have time nor money to do.Everything that is not achievable by the render engine.But one may ask this question : since there has been a huge improvement of rendering techniques with PBR and path tracing, why would you want to tweak your renders in a compositing software ? How do we define compositing in the context of a full CG animation film ? I personally see two reasons. I am not trying to start a controversy here. And remember that I only talk about PBR cartoon movies for Hollywood. But this does not make me a compositing artist per se. I do open Nuke daily and understand how the software works. Please keep in mind that I am a lighting artist. But what about animated features ? What would be a proper use of the compositing tool ? In VFX, it is compulsory since you have to use a film plate to light and comp the shots. Compositing in a feature CG animation film is quite different to what’s usually called compositing in VFX or just straight up live action.

As a lighting artist, I know this is a controversial and sensitive subject.
