Friday
Sep152006
Blender
Friday, September 15, 2006 at 2:35PM Anyone out there using Blender? I hadn't realized it contains a node-based compositing toolset, making it seem almost Houdini-like in that respect. The comping features don't seem to be all that well documented, but look very interesting.
3D/2D integradion is one of my favorite things about Fusion 5. It's quite powerful to be able render simple 3D objects right in your compositing app. I hope to show some examples of that one of these days.
Like, after I finish my book!
Reader Comments (9)
Speaking of 2D/3D compositing have you ever tried NUKE ?? Its 3D system is probably the best one i've used.
I hadn't seen Blender's compositing tools - very cool. I downloaded it, but couldn't quite get my head around it.
I've heard a lot of buzz about NUKE, but haven't looked at it. Blender is noteworthy for its platform independence and free cost - good for those guerrilla productions.
NUKE is definitely worth a look. Very powerful and deep.
I really like some of the core ideas in Blender's compositor, but according to a friend of mine it's really baseline at the moment, ie, no multi-threading on rendering, extremely slow, no caching to speak of, etc. Blender has matured a lot in the last six months, so it'll be interesting to see how the compositor advances.
Blender has definitely seen major improvements over the past 6-10 months or so. It's starting to get some commercial support building around it. Allan W's comment about getting his head around it is fairly spot-on: it's biggest shortcoming is that its GUI is very "weird" compared to other 3D apps. Once you get to a certain point in the learning curve, it gets a lot easier, but just getting started can be very intimidating. For those who might be interested in learning, here's a link to help you get started: http://www.respower.com/page_ec_main
The compositing tools were added for the recent Orange Project (see the blender website) which one of my friends worked on. The programmer coded the compositing tools as the artists on the project asked for them, which may be why they are a little rough so far. It was literally a case of "Oh, I need a Hue Saturation node, can you code one?", and a few minutes later there it would be.
Amazing what you can do with open source...
hi stu,
you mentioned you are writing a book.Is this the same one on amazon about making killer DV movies on the cheap or one purely focusing on comping(fusion ???).
Hope you write a book on comping.
The afx book was brilliant and i have always learnt/gained from your posts on the fusion list.
b
Hi Boomji,
Yes, the book is the one you see plastered all over this blog. I once thought I'd write a book about compositing, but then Mark Christiansen did it for me! My new book features mostly After Effects techniques since its one program that you cna use all the way from previs to effects to mastering. I'll have to find some other way to get my Fusion ideas out there!
Blender is pretty fine. My favorite 3d application with XSI (naturally more limited, but fast to use once you wrap your head around it).
It also does camera projections (has done from the start, I think) which is a nice feature for free software.
It does threaded rendering nowadays.