I am just starting out learning AE and I have this 3d animation which fits my hand held movie clip where I tried to make a classic meteor strike.
The animation has bright yellow fire with dark smoke behind, a very bright light flash, and dark volumetric smoke.
I can render these elements separate, but I am unsure what is the best background color choice for each, as I want the blending to be easy and natural…
Any tips?
You might want to export the clips with an alpha channel, then when you blend them together the background color wont matter much. I tend to prefer .tif sequence with alpha channels or quicktime animation with alpha. (Premultiplied if i’m going to bring it back into After Effects)
You can find it in your output module settings. Under “Channels” Change RGB to RGB+Alpha
Black. Will allow you to use Add blending mode any time even without an Alphe channel.
Mylenium
what is the background your are compositing too? Obviously if you have a brighter or light background you’d want a light background to render out the fire/flame etc. but honestly I usually do not render pre-multiplied (matted) when doing flames, smoke, fire etc. I normally use the straight or un-matted mov, or image sequence because I absolutely hate the fringe or halo that the pre-multiplied images create. Pre-multiplied is ok if you render out the sequence against a similar background and using blending modes can sometimes help - but the color richness and other little details get lost or are not as noticeable when doing that.
Ultimately - the final render for your fire is up to you and how you use it.
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