This is too nifty to wait for an end of week post. 🙂
I was messing around with Blender’s vector blur node. I found out if you separate the Speed pass and zero the last two parameters before connecting it to Vector Blur, you can confine the direction of the blur to a trail. This gives you a nice crisp leading edge and a blurry trailing edge, just like the old cartoon days. 🙂
You can use the Separate RGBA and Combine RGBA nodes on the Speed vector to split it up. If you only connect the R and the G (not the B or A), you get a trailing blur. If you want a forward blur, connect the B and the A but not the R and the G. Connect the Combine RGBA to the Speed slot of the Vector Blur node along with Image and Z and voila – trailing blur!
Here’s a heat shimmer effect worth showing off, the new version of Pointy pulling a face and a much brighter look than before thanks to a rough colour grade. I’m loving that blazing burnt orange which settles back to a hazy purple almost reminiscent of Maurice Noble. The desert’s still maybe too barren and flat but I’m liking this a lot.
I’m not sure about the rest of you but I feel like this composite could be an actual still frame from an actual CG animated film. Not some lush Pixar film obviously, something kind of low budget, but a legit actual film nonetheless. So it’s a total headspin to think it came out of me.
Now I see why Grant was encouraging me to take something to composite. The project is suddenly concrete in a way it wasn’t yesterday. That’s kind of awesome. 🙂
Edit: Added the ungraded version of the render and a comparison which shows both the graded and ungraded version in one image. This is why we grade things.
A beatific giant monkey head watches a car drive past. WIP. The matte work near the tree line is horrible. Don’t look at it.
The node setup. The two red boxes are failed experiments.
I thought i was going to be rigging today but i had a hankering to do some compositing work instead. I managed to film a great plate standing out the front of my house – a car drove past just as i got the shot right. It was only going to be a 2D tracking shot, a sky replacement, nothing fancy.
It’s now about twelve hours later.
Do you know how much trouble it is to matte out a simple clear blue sky? I suddenly have a newfound respect for compositors and roto artists. It hadn’t occurred to me yet to take the job of making the sky matte into a paint program to do the stubborn bits by hand but i may end up doing just that if i can’t separate the sky from the tree line.
Then again i looked in the red channel and the image is fringing heavily between the skyline and the trees. Stupid camera. Or codec. Probably. I’d get one of these but i don’t have a spare $3000 lying around unfortunately.
I also have a newfound respect for Blender’s Movie Clip tools. The Mask tool is gleefully easy to use.
I also have a newfound respect for doing things in the proper order – render first, then composite – especially if there’s hacky colour keys involved. Even though Blender lets you render 3D straight into the compositor, don’t. Switch on all the layers (or just the ones you want to use), render an OpenEXR Multilayer and save yourself the tedium of having to re-render hours of bobbing monkey head from scratch like i did today.
The video is just a learning exercise, nothing ground-breaking at all. One of those knowledge-building situations where it’s like this is what happens when you’re lazy and do it wrong – so don’t. Discovering the uncuttable corners and striding along confidence-paved roads to ignorance-fuelled annoyance. And playing Skyrim on the desktop while the oomphy new laptop chugs away.
