Expedition - VFX Breakdown

Music is from CSGO: Hazardous Environments by Kelly Bailey. A little breakdown to show what I did behind the scenes for my little Black Mesa SFM animation. The first SFM animation I've made in years. The mattes were generated by creating a copy of the map with all the materials swapped to a pure white material. A handy feature of Source 2 is also the ability to add override materials to any prop, both in Hammer and your DAG in SFM. I then added some simple planes with a pure black material to separate each layer, disabled DAGS and the map as needed, and then rendered the finished animation several times with different props, twice per layer, one for the regular color, and one for the matte. I could then import them into After Effects and use them as luma track mattes, which has numerous advantages over green screens, one being that color fringing is effectively mitigated, except for cases like the back and mid ground, where I had to completely disable the map as the background fog didn't quite match the