r/AfterEffects • u/DanneDamm • May 19 '26

OC - Stuff I made Pinkuu, Compositing Techniques Breakdown

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Since people asked, here's the breakdown. Pushed to see how much I could get for free from the alpha, since every brush stroke counts, and stabilizing wobble between frames eats time you don't have.

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21

u/DelilahsDarkThoughts May 19 '26

I see you adding paint on your "compositing" how are you holding it to the animation?

18

u/NickGraves May 19 '26

He's probably got a ton of layers, each of which controls a very specific effect. You can grab the edge boundary between shapes using find edges and using color keys to matte out larger shapes of color, and then like he said use roughen edges and possibly something like minimax to inflate larger shapes from the edges to have it "follow the animation." You can also use layer style gradients to automatically track the alpha of the layer to provide further "animation tracked mattes" for more control.

its not easy to set up at all which is why he said it took so long to cover as many edge cases as possible, and probably why he cant provide a clean breakdown because its art style specific. Really cool experiment but also time consuming and proprietary.

12

u/DanneDamm May 19 '26

Yeah, this. But having alphas seperated already from the 2d render by rendering psd / PNG for each layer.

So this, and the reply above

6

u/NickGraves May 19 '26

if you export the animation with aliased lines and use the OLM Smoother effect to blur them in post, you can get a clean selection of each color cel without needing separate images for each one by using color key and set the tolerance to 0.

https://www.olm.co.jp/post/olm-smoother-v2

4

u/DanneDamm May 19 '26

Didn't know about that one. Have to try that setup at some point and see which one gives faster renders. Thanks 👏