So just a really quick shot and a quick breakdown of how I did it. I’ll assume that most of you have an intermediate level of these programs and if you don’t……..well…..

I also hope to do these on a regular basis.

So first you need to come up with a concept. Usually you should sketch that out to get composition, lighting, and layout. Well I knew exactly what I wanted so I did a quick scene in Vue.
Basically it’s an infinite terrain with the camera about 7,000ft above sea level with a custom atmosphere.

So then I render out my scene as a 16bit image. Why 16bit? So that Photoshop will have more information to play with, making any edit’s I need to make alot more flexible. I think I just used the “Final” preset in Vue as I knew that I’d would do some paint overs and the final shot would have a JJ shaky camera that would cause some alot of motion blur that would hide the low quality render. Here’s the render with some Photoshop paint overs.
The paintovers were some cloning around clouds that had sharp edges and darkening the shadows and brightening the highlights via curves adjustments and painting into their masks. Here’s the matte:

Next I knew I wanted a plane to be flying in the shot, so I grabbed a free model from Turbosquid and put it into my 3d package.  To get some bounce light onto my plane I added a reflection map to the plane’s materials.
I then created a sphere, reversed it’s normals and applied the matte painting  to the spehere as a spherical map. I set the sphere to be invisible to the camera, so that it wouldn’t render in the final image, but its color values would bounce around onto my model using the mental ray renderer. Next, I set my matte painting as my viewport background so that I could see where to animate the plane. After animating the plane I rendered it out (16bit again) with an alpha channel. It was rendered as an image sequence and here’s why…….if your render fails, you can start your render from the last frame that successfully completed. You can’t do that with video files such as Quicktime. Another reason, if one or more frames has an issue with them, you can go back and just re-render your bad frames, saving tons of time.
Here’s the screenshot from Max:

Firing up AE I import my matte painting and plane. I set my comp settings to 24p1080 and 32bit float. Why float? Because I knew I wanted a lens flare in my final shot, and floating point creates for more realistic compositing. Do some searches on this, perhaps I’ll explain this better in a future post.
So now I have my two layers in my comp, I convert them to 3d layers and add a 3d camera. Switching to the top view I offest them in 3d space some, just to get a little bit of parallax. I do some color correction on my layers and when I’m satisfied it’s time to add my lens flare.
Videocopilot.net has a wonderful plugin for AE called Optical Flares. You can create just about any lens flare you want using hundreds of different settings to get the effect you want. Definitely check out Andrew Kramer’s site if you haven’t.
So now it’s time to animate my camera. Alot of people know the trick of parenting a null to the camera and adding a wiggle. Problem with that, is that procedure is very mathematical, not organic. So another trick is to take some previously shot footage (in my case handheld) and track that footage. Then apply the tracked data to a null object. Then parent your 3d camera to this null object. This will create organic looking footage, well because the position data came from real footage!
The footage I tracked wasn’t jittery enough so I did go ahead and parent my null to another null with a wiggle expression. Hypocritical I know. I then added some position and rotation keyframes on the camera itself to push the camera in towards the plane.
Some final color correction was applied on top of everything using an adjustment layer.
Turn on motion blur, set up a render queue and done!

Okay not really. There may be some issues to correct, whether in your compositing or in your matte. Go back and fix those until you get what you want.

One thing I didn’t mention in all of this was color management in AE.  Working in a linear workspace I had to assign a linear color profile. If you have color management turned ON, AE will convert your source’s original color profile to the working space profile. This keeps everything looking as it should. To check this, when you import your footage, right click on it and choose Interpret Footage, then click the color profile tab. Here you can assign it’s input profile to be converted to the working space.

This also applies for rendering as well.

Set up your render queue and in the output settings there is another color profile tab. Depending on your delivery, you can assign whatever profile you want. For this project my output profile was sRGB, since my delivery was for the web. This could be a whole other post in itself, just be aware that this feature  is there, because if it’s turned on and not managed properly, you can have some disastrous results, like evil You Tube comments.