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JANUARY 14, 2004 Planar Fog in After Effects Great strides have occurred over the last couple of years by bringing many 3D concepts and tools into this once 2D compositing program. While the current version of After Effects supports 3D “fog” (z-depth information) from third party programs (LightWave, 3dsmax, Mays, etc.), there isn’t a built in fog-filter. Or is there? In this After Effects 6.0 exercise, we’ll use the basic Tint effect, expressions, and the Background Color of the Comp to create a unique Planar Fog effect. Way back in the early days of my 3D experience, I used NewTek’s LightWave 3D quite a bit (back then it was still part of the Video Toaster and ran on an Amiga). In order to simulate fog, LightWave would take the color of the background and tint the objects in the scene based on their distance from the camera. You could set the minimum and maximum distance of this fog to achieve varying densities. Of course the greatest problem with this effect was that you didn’t have swirling fog, you couldn’t have ground fog, and the results were less than stellar. However there is one big advantage to using this type of fog effect – if you want to recreate the haze that is present in our atmosphere (atmospheric volumetrics). [an error occurred while processing this directive]You have seen this effect in mountain range photos (or in real life) where the range that is further away takes on the color and contrast of the atmosphere. DaVinci noticed this and wrote about it. Ancient Asian art shows this, and today, we can bring this same effect to After Effects. Since this effect is most noticeable in landscape images, let’s create a landscape composition and create the effect from the ground up. In order to fully understand what we are going to do, we need to define what controls we want over the effect.
Setting the scene Let’s begin by setting up our scene. Step 1: Create three solid layers (Command+Y) and give them a nice green color. Step 2: Using the Pen Tool create a mountain range mask for each of the layers. Step 3: Make each of these layers a 3D layer and position them along the Z axis.  Step 4: Set the Background Color for the Comp to a light blue. Step 5: Add a Camera to the Composition and place it at the bottom of the Timeline Stack. In this exercise, I used a default 50mm lens with DOF (Depth of Field) turned off.  Ok, our scene is set up, but because each of the layers is the same color the scene looks rather dull and frankly- messed up. 
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