My studio is currently working on a TV commercial for one of our clients. The concept is great but putting it all together is quite a challenge. The main theme in this ad are floating book pages that display images and videos on their spines. Although I figured out a way to create non-flat 3D pages in After Effects and a clever way to animate them, we didn’t go with that because it took forever to render. On the other hand creating the animation in a 3D application lacks the flexibility that allows to change the pace of motion and the videos displayed on the spines. Since I don’t like our own creations taking control over us and limiting our creativity we had to find the mid-ground to this problem.

16 bpc, RPF/EXR and Texture UV channel did the job perfectly. But that wasn’t all. If you ever tried to do some postproduction and compositing of 3D graphics in After Effects you probably know the big issue of zDepth and other additional channels like Object ID, or Normal map. The problem is that in most cases those channels lack anti-aliasing, which is understandable by the way. I know why that is but knowing it doesn’t help to solve the problem. The easiest workaround is to render the passes in a higher resolution and then scale them down. Bicubic scaling gives natural anti-aliasing but it just didn’t work for us.

Today we just solved that and a few other problems by creating custom color maps that we then use in After Effects to change the final look and feel of the animation. Even though the whole idea and workflow for this project is very simple the problems that occurred made it quite a pain in the neck. Good news is that some day we will surely make a tutorial covering the production of that specyfic clip in detail.