After producing the rendered video, I post-processed some of the scenes in After Effect, adding presets, masks, and color grading to make the scenes more vivid and unobtrusive.

For the opening scene with the flags flying, I wanted to pay homage to the opening fluttering scene in the CG video ‘awaken Arkia’ and design the production. After rendering the output, I added a smoke drift to the rendered video to reflect the dust and decay of the scene. At the same time, I wanted to bring out the spirit of the flag never falling and never giving up.

The scene where the plane lifts off was created by stitching together Unreal Engin 5 backgrounds and Maya-rendered plane animations. To avoid inconsistencies and overlaps in the scene, I lowered the height of the clouds and tried to avoid the appearance of dividing lines. I also added some cloud material to the front and back of the plane to add movement to the scene and to block the dividing lines.

For the plane, I wanted to make it appear more high-tech and mysterious, so I added transparency and some lightning-protective film to the plane through AE.

With the effect of human weapons at the end, it occurred to me that the presence of some “mystical” powers (such as Thor’s hammer) could make the whole story more interesting and that it is only with great power that one can fight against a powerful opponent. I tracked the weapons in the screen and added some lightning material tied to the weapons.

The scene where the human and AI meet is arguably the most complex scene in the whole production, not because of the difficulty of modeling, but because animating the whole scene in Unreal Engine 5 was a challenge for me. The scene took almost a week to create because of the size of the scene and the fact that it was used from many angles, causing the GPU to crash when the computer was opening and adjusting the model.

Fortunately, I ended up with this scene and I’m quite happy with the result. I didn’t intend to add any effects, but during the editing process I felt that something was missing, so I added some dust and smoke when the plane landed, which wasn’t as realistic as the particle effects, but it was better than nothing. For the final smash of the weapon, I added some ground lightning to match the effect of the lightning being emitted afterward.