Making The Animation

Before I've started making the animation I knew it will be very hard to synchronise 2D and 3D. I've never done anything like it before. I've decided to make one bit at a time. I've started with the backgrounds.

                                          

Then I've done the animation of the first domino character on Maya. I had to know the number of the frame where he needs to stop or to start. After that I've imported rendered character into AfterEffects and added some key frames.

Here is the animation of the character and the result of putting it together with the environment.

As you can see this synchro doesn't look good. The character sometimes moves too slow or too fast. I had to reanimate my character again and then put it into the environment and change some positions.

Here is the result of my second attempt:

I'm quite happy with this result. It is much cleaner.

Then I've animated the other character on Maya. It's quite harder than the first one because it moves a little bit more. However, now I could animate the second character based on the first one as both of them are jumping and moving at the same time. When I've put the other character into the animation I was happy with the first result and there's no need to change it.

Here is how it looks:

Once the characters were sorted I've decided to make my animation more 3D by adding foregrounds and backgrounds. I was thinking about using the Z axis in AfterEffects, but there was no need for that. Rearranging the layers did the job. To make it work I've moved the items in the front quicker than the items on the back.

I left the hardest to the last. The entrance to the restaurant. All the environment is in 2D and I want the entrance to be in 3D. I've built the entrance on Maya and animated it. After that I imported it into AfterEffects to see how it looks. I found a lot of problems I will have to come over to make it look good.

Here is my first result of importing the entrance into AfterEffects without any tweaking:

For my second test with entrance I tried to move it and rotate it to match the background. I think it could be possible if I put a key frame every frame. However, I found out that the ground will be very difficult to match as it is in 2D and goes in straight line while the entrance is in 3D and is in straight line just for a moment in the middle.

To fix the ground problem I've decided to do and shade the ground in Maya. I knew that I'll never be able to exactly match the colours so I've used transparent ramp shader to hide the transfer between the colours as much as I can.

This idea didn't work at all. I would have to spend many hours tweaking vertices every frame to match 2D background and it still wouldn't be perfect.

I really struggled to figure out the solution for my problem. And then I got the idea that could work but would really change my animation. I've decided to make the environment in 3D from the point where my characters leave the boat. Surprisingly it didn't take as much time as I thought and the result is fine. The only problem was to make the characters go through the door, which means part of the wall will be behind them and the other part will be in front of them. I was thinking of reanimating them and resynchronising them again. But it would take too much time. I've decided to cut the wall and render it twice showing different part of the wall in each render. Then after importing them into AfterEffects I'll just rearrange the layers. And it really worked!

Here are the wall renders in alpha from Maya: