Original subtitles

Let's get started on adding some atmosphere to this guy.

The first thing I'd like to do is kind of get rid of these jaggies at the top,

and I don't think those'll come out in the render,

it would just make me feel more comfortable if we added a little edge blur here.

So I'm going to pipe an edge blur in here and take a look at it in the Viewer,

and I'm just going to slide that back and forth to see the effect,

and you'll see this edge jaggy kind of goes away.

So I'm just kind of going to blur the edge a little.

So I think something that's really going to help this

image is to add a little atmosphere, and over here we see a little oxygen bloom,

a little blue fade that goes out into space,

and adding that's going to help us a lot.

So, to do that,

what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the alpha layer from this image,

and I'm going to turn it into the atmosphere that we see leaking out into space.

So I'm going to drop a Shuffle Node down here.

I'm going to shuffle the alpha into all of the channels so that we get a clean,

white mat.

The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a constant,

and if I click on this little box,

I'm going to sample the color that I want to use for that constance.

So I'm going to zoom in on this image, and I really like these blues,

I'm holding down Ctrl on the keyboard, and I'm going to select that value,

and it turns that constant to that value.

Now, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pull a ShuffleCopy,

and I'm going to plug one representing the alpha into

that Shuffle Node we just made, and a two into the constant,

and we take a look at that in the Viewer,

and a Premult is just going to multiply that alpha into that constant.

So this is the image that we get.

I'm going to reorder those Viewers because that got a little funky.

Now essentially what we're going to do is we're going to blur the heck out

of this and kind of lay it in behind our original image.

So if I drop a Blur Node down into my comp,

and I take a look at that in my Viewer, I can raise this level up quite a bit,

and see how it gets pretty blurry?

That's cool.

We want it to be pretty blurry at this point,

and we're going to drop a Merge Node down here,

and I'm just going to take my original image,

which is up here, if we look at it in the Viewer.

This is our original image,

and we're going to pipe that into A so that image is going to lie on

type of this blue image that we just made in B.

So if we take a look at that in the Viewer,

we get that blue bloom,

but we kind of want it to eat into the earth too because

you see we have the effect of that here,

and it looks like this halo is a little too thick,

it's kind of on the nose.

So let's fix that.

So to fix that, I'm just going to come into this blur,

and I'm going to really drastically reduce it down

to where I think it should be, and I'm looking at this edge of the planet,

because over here we're pretty crisp, and we can make this pretty crisp.

What we just need to do is get rid of this stuff on the backside of the planet.

So to do that, I'm going to just create a Roto shape,

and I'm going to lay down just four points to make a box.

I'm going to select all these points,

I'm going to hit Z a couple times to give me a pretty nice circle,

and then once I have that circle drawn, I'm going to lay a Merge in,

I'm going to connect the A to the Blur, and connect this to the other Merge,

and plug that Roto into the mat.

Now with this Roto selected up here, I'm going to hit Spacebar so I have a nice,

big field of view, and I can play with where I want this edge to appear,

and that's just a matter of blending the curves in a way

that you think this planet should look.

So I'm going to come back in a minute and show you what I did.

I think I've got a pretty good result here.

Now, what's important to note is that if you have one of these points selected,

there's a little perpendicular line, and if you grab that line,

this is a feathering that the Roto will do.

So it's just going to blend from being solid at this point to

being completely transparent on this point.

So I'm going to Ctrl+Z that,

and I just used those feathering edges to get the edge I want as this

marine layer crept across the back of the planet.

So I'm going to hit Spacebar and go back here and close all this out,

and take a look at it,

and I think that's a pretty good blend of the atmosphere into

the dark side of the planet right here,

and I think that's a pretty good blend here.

So I'm happy with this,

but I think what it needs is this encroachment of the atmosphere

that's kind of a facing ratio that we see,

if you're looking dead-on on the planet,

you're not going to see the edge of the atmosphere,

but that atmosphere is going to transmit light the

closer you get to the edge of the planet.

So we want that kind of blending to take place here.

So a really easy way to do that is to use a node called a Lightwrap.

So let's take a look at that in the next clip.