Wed 28th April 20:
Leaving the lava river animation to render overnight allowed ampule time for it to be finished at three in the afternoon of April 29th, which was a twenty-one hour fully render of 699 frames. After replacing the background with the JPG frames, an image sequence was made in After Effects. The duration had to be changed of the hell environment composition to make it fit the image sequence of 700 frames.***
After extending the lava river layer, I found that After Effects didn't import everything in the Image Sequence and it only imported 583 frames than the fully 699 frames. I check the folder system and they were all numbered 1 to 700 so couldn't figure out the problem with it (See 0:02:04).
So later I looked between 583, 584, & 585 frames to see where the broken link or the miss named frame was but couldn't find a problem. I tried to reload the image sequence and reimport the images but that didn't fix the problem.
My solution was to I opened up Adobe Premiere and I imported the images into Premiere. Then rendered them out of the program as an MP4. I imported the new rendered MP4 into After Effect and this seemed to fix the missing frame problem.
I previewed the animation in After Effects and I looked the right speed & look. After previewing the animation, I had to extend the other separate layers to 700 frames so it would play through with no missing frames (See 0:08:55 - 0:10:20). After extending the timescale of the layers the preview was like good progress of the start of a moving animation.
After I extended the layers, I noticed I needed to change the timescale of the composition to 28 seconds as 700 frames at 25fps is 28 seconds. I changed this because when I played the loop preview, I missed extended the other layers by 1 frame.
After fixing the length of the composition, I want to render the new version as an MP4 but I didn't have that preset in After Effects. I looked for the preset for MP4 but just couldn't find it, so I rendered the new version development as a Quicktime format (See 0:12:35 - 0:13:36). This was the first animated version of my 3D modelling hell and devil environment.
I wanted to render the animation as an MP4 because it can play in many media players but a MOV will only play in VLC and Quicktime players. The problem with MOV videos is it struggles and buffers in the VLC media player. So I made the MOV by default open in VLC automatically every time. Later I will find out and research how to render an MP4 from After Effects.
After finishing that version, I thought that if the lava river is moving (animated) that I would get the other fires (flames and flaming trees). So I opened up the fire Maya files so I can render them with 700 frames (from Frame 2 to 701) and the render of the fire took 50 minutes to render (3:37pm - 4:27pm).
After rendering the fire, I went back into After Effects to the renders into the scene and replace the still fire with the moving version. I start to replace the still fire image with the image sequence but then I remembered what happened with the lava river (having missing frames). So I repeated the same process in premiere by making the 700 frames into an MP4 to transfer into After Effects.
After replacing the still flame with the moving fire, I found that the moving fire MP4 (that I used to replace the still image) had a black background making the environment not being seen. During the time I thought the problem was with After Effects so I reimported the moving flame into the environment to see if that would fix that problem and kept doing this till I realised it was the video.
So I went into the Maya file to see if I rendered the image sequence as PNG with Alpha channel and saw that everything was correct and the render was set up to have PNGs with an Alpha channel. So I checked the already rendered sequence and they also had an alpha channel backgrounds.
So I thought to render the image sequence as a video in Photoshop but the program crash so I gave up with this program. So I opened up the Hell Environment in After Effects and I imported the renders as an Image Sequence to get the renders in with an Alpha background.
So the renders imported in After Effects perfectly with the Alpha background but the Image Sequence in the program had the same problem as the lava river where After Effects didn't import all the frame. So I opened up premiere again to see if I can fix both problems.
So I did render the flame in Maya as a PNG sequence with an Alpha background. But previously I rendered the image sequence out from Premiere as an MP4 but this preset gave the video a black background. So when I got the premiere open again, I needed to find in the H.264 (MP4) format how to give a video an Alpha channel background.
So I changed the format to the PNG format as I knew this format would have Alpha channel backgrounds. But after I rendered in this format, and looked for the video I noticed it only rendered a single image rather than a video so I deleted the image.
Then I went back into Premiere to find another way. So I research a tutorial on YouTube to make a video with an Alpha background and I found a video called 'How To Export With A Transparent Background in Premiere Pro (alpha channel) | Tutorial'. This video showed me that in the Quicktime format could have an alpha background but I needed to change the preset to 'Custom'.
So that I could alter the video codec to 'Animation' and this would give me the option to export with an Alpha channel by shifting the depth from 8-bpc to 8-bpc + Alpha to give me a transparent background to the video.
After exporting the video, I tried again to import the moving fire into After Effects again to see if the Alpha channel worked from Premiere. The alpha channel in the video worked and let it show the background environment whilst the fire moves.
After previewing the fire in After Effects, I realised that when the animation loops that the fire blips because some of the frames are missing in the fire as it was rendered where the fires just starting. So I went back into Maya to find which frame the fire is at its fullest.
So I rendered the fire from frame 28 to 728 [4:52pm to 5:40pm] and it took 48 minutes to render. After exporting the frames in Premiere again (using the alpha channel preset), I imported the rendered video into After Effects and after a preview, everything looks right with the fire. When I complete the fire, I saved and exported the new development of the hell environment.
Later, I also went back into Maya so I could render the animation of the flaming tree. I set the render for frame 25 to 725 (5:48pm to 6:19pm) which took the render 31 mins to render. Afterwards, I had to rename the layers in After Effects to understand them better.
After I went into Premiere to export the rendered images as a video with an Alpha channel (to fix a previous problem again), I replaced the still fire tree footage, in After Effects, with the rendered video to see the moving animation with all the 699 frames all in the video.
After, doing a quick preview of the movement of all the assets, I found that the movement looked all well. But then I noticed that all the fires looked like they move at the same time. So I offset the fire frames to give each asset a unique look so I offset the fires with the existing frames. (See 0:53:27 - 1:05:16)
After offsetting the layers, I had to undo the offset because I forgot to render a Quicktime render development. After undoing, I exported the version. After doing this, I had to redo the offsetting for the fire assets then rendered the latest updates.
Later after viewing the latest development video, I realised I shouldn't have put duplicated trimmed videos of the fires and fire trees, next to each other. Because when they get to the end of the cut and play the start of the duplicate layer, it creates a blip in the playing.
So I realised I had to delete the duplicated layers and work out what extra frames with my calculator. So I went into Maya to render the extra frames that I trimmed off so the playback wouldn't blip. I had to position the new footage in the same place as the others to stop a blip. (See 1:12:03 - 1:46:24)
After fixing the blip, I had to figure out how to export an MP4 from After Effects so I research a video called 'How to Export MP4 File from After Effects' which showed me step by step how to do it.
But when I tried to do the tutorial in my After Effects file and when I tried to add the hell environment to the Adobe Media Encoder queue, After Effects give me a warning message saying 'After Effects: AEGP Plugin AEDynamicLinkServer: Adobe Media Encoder is not installed. Please download and install it to use this feature. Go to https://creative.adobe.com/apps.' but I couldn't figure out how to fix it the problem [and didn't want more programs on my computer]. (See 1:46:56 - 1:47:30)
So I just abandoned exporting it as MP4 in After Effects. My solution to get around this problem was to go into Adobe Media Encoder and convert all the Quicktime [MOVs] videos into MP4s. (See 1:47:34 - 1:49:17)
References
Adobe. (2020). ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD DESKTOP APPS. Retrieved from https://creative.adobe.com/apps
Ebiner, P. (2017, 15 Aug). How to Export MP4 File from After Effects. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/iXXROg1YW34
Newman, A. (2017, 27 Sep). How To Export With A Transparent Background in Premiere Pro (alpha channel) | Tutorial. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/ukY2IGDXSAU
