Apart from making those render passes, I made two matte passes for the cloth to control the color of two areas; a special one to control the glow of the sword; one to make the sword darker at the bottom of the blade; a depth pass and another one to add occlusion to the floor (Fig.13).

Composition

Even though the compositing tree may seem very complex (Fig.14) that is only because I had 26 passes. In reality it was quite simple.


The biggest problem I had here was trying to achieve the glow effect on the sword, so I'll try to explain it. The first problem I found was that the sword's render pass seemed plain, but then I realized that it didn't have specular highlights and so I added one exclusive light to fix this.

When I do glows with Fusion, although it has two powerful nodes for this specific task, I find that for the best results it's usually a good idea to combine two or more nodes like color correctors and so on: this way you have more control over the effect.

First I directly merged the sword render pass, added a color corrector and merged with darken blend mode to adjust the color. Then the sword gradient pass helped me darken the bottom of the sword and I blended it in multiply mode. Finally I added another color corrector to accentuate the cavities and the desired glow node in normal mode and half blending (Fig.15).