ENDA Episode 169→ The time when ENDA faces a Multipass Challenge (Part 5)
The key is choosing the right amount of glow. That might sound simple, but in practice it often means testing how the glow intensity interacts with other elements...
You might think that adding the light from the backpack would be the easiest part of this comp.
Nothing fancy, just an A-over-B and maybe a bit of colour correction…
How wrong I was to think that.
First of all, our render has a slight flicker, and since we can’t send it back to render again, we need to be smarter.
The key is choosing the right amount of glow. That might sound simple, but in practice it often means testing how the glow intensity interacts with other elements: how it reads from a distance, how depth of field affects how we perceive it, making sure it doesn’t burn out too much, and so on.
Then comes the question:
Should we animate the light to make the flicker look intentional?
We try it… and after a few tests, we realize it actually looks worse.
The final setup?A single Glow node with its brightness at the default value, and no extra animation on top to fake our own flicker.
Looking only at the final result, it might seem as if all those previous steps were unnecessary. However, it’s precisely this trial-and-error process that helps us understand how our shot behaves, and why we make certain choices. That understanding alone is a valuable asset if you want to keep growing as an artist.
But what happens when we need to add footage rather than a render?
What happens if that footage doesn’t work the way we expected, and we need to adapt it?
Well, that will be for the next episode.
The journey continues…
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