Compositing

 

After rendering my animation files with multiple passes. I then opened up Autodesk Composite and imported the Open EXR files. I could then choose on the options what pass channel I would like to use and blend them together with settings so I can control the intensity of these mixes.

 

First off, I selected the Diffuse channel, this being my animations major image. I then used 'blend and combine' with the Ambient Occlusion channel on the front and back gain. I reduced the opacity of the AO to 0.26000 to just give the diffuse a bit of tone.

 

 

Next I continued to use blend and combine with my animation's Specular, this is the spot where the light bounces off the object. I then added grain, blur and cc basics to the composition. This allows me to make the animation look like its part of the scene more where I can even out the pixelation and colour temperature.

I imported the original video frames and used the resize tool to scale the video down to 1024x576 and used CC Basics again to control the colour temperature of the video. But to make my animation appear in front of the background video, I had to use an alpha channel.

 

 

To achieve this, I had to go back into Maya & under the diffuse Material pass add 4 channels (4^th being an alpha) and I also changed the plane textures to lambert, so they no longer blended in with the background so I could extract the shadow correctly from these and rendered another set of EXR files. I then imported the alpha channel and used control edge to remove some of the dark outline from my animation by making the outer distance -1.00 and inner 1.00 with a inner softness at 1.50. I added this alpha channel to the masking tab, allowing the previous channels to overlay on the background video.
 

 

Lastly, I used blend and composition to add the new shadow channel I created and the reflection channel to complete the composition. I rendered the completed video into a PNG image sequence, then used Adobe After Effects to merge the frames together and output the final AVI video.