Dramatic Sunset + Rain

Okay, it's been quite some time since I posted an entry. I'm so busy currently because I have so many projects at hand - both from school and personal. And most of these projects revolves around Fusion =D

So a very brief and quick post for today. One of the projects I'm working on is a dramatic sunset which transforms into a night sky, after which it starts to rain. It's part of a logo animation for Crewsade I'm doing. And a good thing is that the techniques used are all discovered by myself while exploring Fusion. So what I did was I started off with a simple static jpeg photograph of clouds which I took from my handphone camera.

I animated it using two grid warp nodes - one to animate the background clouds and the other to animate the big foreground cloud. Then I went onto color correcting this animation - one to make it into a warm sunset evening and the other into a night scene. I also created the sun, added the light rays and a lens flare.

Sunset Scene


Night scene

And I went onto add the subtle lightning happening behind the clouds using color correction and a mask.

Can't really see a difference here but in the animation, the lightning is very obvious.

Once these three passes were done, I merged them all. I animated the sun setting and the light rays to follow it. The scene changes here gradually into the night time scene, lightning strikes and then it starts to rain almost immediately after that. This has been the most complex work I've done so far:

One thing I learnt from this mini project - be organised when compositing. Keep the nodes nice and organised so that the entire flow is easy to read.

Unfortunately, I haven't rendered the animation yet because it takes a hell of a long time to render with motion blur and the fact that it's in high definition. I'm currently busy with a school project (which I can't talk about right now). Once I'm done, I'll probably render and upload this short animation.

More later! =)