My Mythical Creature in Real-Life Environments
After I had completely finished with my model, I then moved on to placing it into real-life backgrounds using After Effects. Each of these background photos had been taken by one of the Animation staff members (apart from the very first one which I had taken myself). The one bad thing about only being able to use photos that had been taken by either me or the staff member was that my creature's habitat is supposed to be a snowy/arctic environment, and none of the photos we were given to choose from were photos of snow, which was quite annoying.
I really like how I fit this one in with the coastal environment, how my creature is just standing there, enjoying the sunlight and the view looking out onto the sea. I took care when adding the shadow to this one, trying to make sure I was including it in all the right places, by working out where I thought the direction of the sunlight was coming from. Since my creature was already quite bright on one side due to how it rendered, I decided to go along with that to use as my point of contact with light. Knowing this, I could then add the shadow of my actual creature onto the opposite side.
This one I feel wasn't the best composition out of the three images I chose, but due to me wanting my character to be quite large, I couldn’t put it in a lot of backgrounds we were given, only ones with massive open spaces, so there weren't really many photos with that option. Going with what I had to work with, I edited the saturation of my creature, so the brightness of it fitted nicely with the surroundings, and I also applied some shadow onto the side of my creature where I felt the light wouldn't be hitting. I feel it turned out ok but even I agree it wasn't one of my best ones.
This composition is definitely my overall favourite, due to it being my third and final one I feel I put the most effort into it. It showcases my creature’s silhouette really well and I'm very proud of how the shadow of my creature turned out, as I feel that part took the longest to composite. Before Importing my creature into the scene I looked for the direction of light, as the photo was quite dark. I noticed how the shadows of the trees in the distance were very long which told me the sun would have been very low in the sky, and since the trees had shadows coming into the foreground, the point of light was going to have been right at the back behind them. Bearing this in mind, I could then incorporate the shadow into the scene as well as lowering the brightness and saturation of my creature itself to fit in more nicely, as the side facing the camera would all be in shadow due to the light coming from the back, thus it would be darker.
Finally, I decided to be a little more adventurous with this last composition by adding a ‘light ray’ effect to make it look a little more authentic, which I feel worked out really well. I especially like how I managed to get some of the rays of light to shine through the gaps where my creature isn't blocking the light, as well as around the rim of its head, as this added a nice glow further helping to show my creatures ‘god-like’ status.
Overall, I am very pleased with the turnouts of my three final composited images, and I feel that they all work really well together.
