Show Your Working (2)

Following on from my first 'Show Your Working' post (here), I was able to use the University facilities to render my high-definition Maya sequences, which could be composited to create a final concept.

After working primarily with Photoshop to create images which developed the style I wanted to create, I built a composition using After Effects which would further the same style, although being applied to an image sequence rather than a single frame.

I also took this opportunity to add a time counter to my sequence. This posed it's own problems though, as I did not want a timer that would count real-time frames or seconds/minutes. I wanted a counter which would refer to the appropriate timestep of the cell development process being shown (in this example, where 1 frame was equivalent to 5 minutes of simulation, or 1 second was the same as 2 hours and 5 minutes).

After reading various tutorials online, I was able to find an expression which could be used in After Effects, to achieve the outcome I wanted. I modified the expression to suit my own composition, and applied this to a new text layer, so that it was visible. There was some trial and error involved in the modification, as the time units did not seem to obviously correspond to our time system, so I ended up increasing the expression timesteps gradually until the counter responded as it was intended to. I added a second static text layer, explaining the units being shown on screen (for clarity).

The completed concept has now been built in both Photoshop and After Effects, and can be adapted to suit different render passes, or a longer scene, as necessary.