FFIXR Tribute | Week 5 - Post Process and Final Composition

Welcome back to the final stretch of this blog post! This week I'll be sharing my post process setup and go through how I develop my composition. While the master material setup from last week works really well right off the bat, I feel like the post process work does takes it to the final 10%. 

BEAUTY

The main idea for the post process is to mix in the Base Color pass into the Beauty, this way we can start seeing more of the painterly details. On top of that, I added a subtle paper texture overlay across the screen space, which then being picked up by the Kuwahara filter. 

LINE ART

Once we get the beauty done, I still feel there's something missing. As most 2D animated content works, we need to add some line art work over it. The way I chose to do it is based on an edge detection and normal surface details detection.

With both being done, now what's left is to blend them together. I decided to create 2 option to overlay the line art, 1 is using a custom stencil mask, the other is using a remapped Z mask. The idea behind the Z mask is I can organically control how far we'll see the line art. But for this project's sake, the custom stencil works much better and faster to control. So I left them at default.

LINE COLOR

Last but not least, we need to give the line art a color. I opted to multiply the main beauty pass with a vector 3 Constant. But you can use a blend overlay, just for my case I preferred the look of the multiply.

Now that we're done, let's talk about composition. Honestly I felt that my earlier composition that it's missing depth, as we go back to the photographic references, we can clearly see that they tends to have something in the fg to emphasize the depth since heavy fog makes the depth too diffused.

On top of that, I also felt that the scene is too empty, despite following the concept art. I think the main issue was that the concept art is much more stylized in model whereas my environment are created with modular assets as a base and lack the exaggerated angles. Shout out to my friend Rudy Crutz for pointing that out! So in the end, I decided to add a few more unique assets to emphasize the exaggerated look and also build up the fg with some statues and characters. Here's the progression shot looks like:

In the end, I added a few more cameras into the scene and added some text bubbles using Davinci Resolve. Here's some of the camera work I ended up using: