UFO Appearance

For this I was to demonstrate skills of comping CGI over live-action.

I decided to keep my original UFO design because I struggled to come up with a new design that works with all the other assets that were made. It wasn’t badly modelled either and I still liked the idea of the glowing rings I added to it so it would have been a shame not to use it.

The textures on my UFO are quite clearly stretched and could have come out a lot better if I had properly applied the texture but for the sake of demonstrating my composition skills I didn’t feel it necessary. The final outcome still looks good and the textures are forgivable to say the least.

After quickly fixing up my UFO, I set up the camera and back-plate of an image I took from my trimmed footage of the building in which the UFO would fly over. After setting this up I got on angling the UFO and then animating it. I grouped the entire UFO, rings and lights so they would all move together and then animated the glowing rings separately. After finishing the animating and I rendered out both the master layer and occlusion layer so that when brought into after effects there would be shadows for my UFO after following the necessary steps. The shadow did end up being a bit grainy but it made so much of a difference to the spaceship and believability as it sits much better in the shot.

I then masked out the areas on the building that look like they would give off reflection as there is quite a mix of materials on the building used. I then inverted the window layer and added an overlay and alpha matte effect to create the reflection. I then did a little colour correction on the building layers and added a purple tint to them but after rendering the scene out it actually looks very de-saturated. It sort of works though because I have quite a dark and dull sky texture in the background and the de-saturated look also give attention to the UFO but possibly makes it stand out too much?

Despite the arguments made with the colour correction I think the finished product looks very nice. I added a fast blur to the reflection because it was a little too sharp and I think it sits in the overall shot quite well.