Exposure Techniques for Animations

[Jason Matthews]

Hey Everyone.

 

A little background info: I have been working on a large animation for the last few weeks (modeling, lighting, materials, etc.) and have locked on to a feel for the animation. The setting is somewhere around 5:00pm to give the scene character with respect to lighting, shadows, and atmosphere. My lighting setup consists of a daylight system using a standard spot light (Vray shadows) an HDRI ambient lighting (placed on a vray light dome) and a Vray camera.

 

The question is, what is the best way to handle the different exposures as the camera moves through the scene? I was thinking about rendering say 100 frames with one exposure and then 100 frames with a different exposure. Maybe 20 or 30 of those frames would be overlapping the previous exposure. Then fading those overlapping exposures. Does this sound like a good way to handle it? The main issue is all of the extra frames rendered. I plan on many different camera angles and scenes.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

[aaronrumple]

Just animate the camera exposure. Takes a bit of time to do the test shots you need at the different points, but is not too difficult.

You can also animate exposure in After Effects. You don't have as great a range to play with since the image already has an exposure, but you can tweak it a little.

[Jason Matthews]

That is a great idea. I had no idea that you could animate exposure!

Thank you!

[cupsster]

I think that in max you can animate nearly all values that you can edit with mouse or keyboard..

[jcaddy]

You can also just render out full float EXR's and it might get you further than you think. Give it a shot.

[Fooch]

I know that this might be hard for different teams / studios but perhaps it might be better to cut the scenes out to shots. It reads better film wise instead of having a flythrough zipping in and out anything.

[KiboOst]

You would render to linear exr (no exposure) and animate exposure in toxik in realtime. Toxik allways work in full 32bit and is made from ground up to work on multichannels exr, it is lighting fast for such exposure/color grading on float footages. Really eyes opening !

Compositing in linear hdr is also better for all color correction / grading. you will just have to add an sRGB node into the player so you can view your comp in gamma 2.2 but work in linear. Only at the end, put another srgb node just before output and render your comp.