Blender 3D Compositing Course from cmiVFX
Sebastian König writes:Hey guys! Finally it’s finished! My new tutorial “Blender 3D Compositing” is now available at cmiVFX.com. I know, I promised a launch for september, but it took longer than expected.
the announcement video
Sebastian continues:
Originally I just wanted to do the follow-up to my previous tutorial about camera-tracking with Syntheyes and create a tutorial about inserting CG elements into some HD footage. But when I started recording I realized that you already need a strong foundation of compositing knowledge to be able to follow the required steps for CG integration. That’s why I decided to do the whole show and create a complete and extensive compositing tutorial that not only shows you how to integrate CG into film and add some nice effects but also goes into a lot of details of the technical side of compositing. So be prepared for more than 5 hours of nodes, renderlayers, renderpasses, pixelmath, filters, masks and colorgrading!
The finished scene.
Link: Blender 3D Compositing
Wow! That’s VERY interesting!
so very cool
love it
Wonderful.. i’m happy to know that blender compositor is beginning to have a lot of tutorials.. thinking of subscribing now ;D
sorry for the double post but i just wanna know the title of the background music of the first video..
..sorry for my bad english
this is the best i have ever senn (aside sintel)
seriouls;
Yes,
that music makes me think of a movie announcement.
When did this genre of announcement music start ?
Its purpose is clearly to leave the audience with a psyhological impact.
Thanks a lot!
@mr.Me: the music is from Pro Scores (Videocopilot). See here: http://www.videocopilot.net/products/proscores/
That also kind of answers the question from
@filip: Yeah, it’s sort of bombastic. Probably a bit- uhm- overload, but I found it kinda cool. And yes, it’s meant to have a psychological impact. After all, it’s advertising ;-)
Hm nice but Blenders compositor isn’t still powerfull enough to mess with commercial products.
The finished scene feels so “bioshock”.. big daddy’s in amsterdam? ;)
Which is better, this or Andrew Price’s course?
@Chrome Monkey: I don’t think you can really compare them. It’s a completely different focus. Andrew covers more effects, how, why and when you can use them. It’s an excellent ressource for improving and enhancing your renders. Well, the name says it all – it helps you add the wow-factor! :-) I definitely would recommend it.
But if you want to know how to split your render into passes and how to recombine them, if you want to how to use renderlayers, masks and passes to achieve a workflow that would not be possible in a “normal” render, then I would say this one might be better. I try to go a bit more into the technical details and principles behind combining nodes and passes. And of course the second big chapter about integrating 3d into film is not covered the wow-factor.
But of course there might be other opinions on this.
@ chrome: the stuff sebastian_k is doing here is much more advanced than Messrs Price. If you’re starting out, Price; if you want more, sebastian. Simple really.
Isn´t the second score from a french power metal band intro song? favourite band…sounds extremely alike, no, is the one and only… sure of that
put that aside, great news and I hope I can get those tuts
@eonmach thanks! hehe, nah, the score of the second one is a selfmade mix of a nice ambience-sound from freesound.org, some elements form videocopilot’s ProScores and some other sounds.
Hey Sebastian, I went to the cmiVFX page to order the video and got the following discouraging message:
“Your Browser is not supported at this time. We can’t guarantee all features. Please use Google Chrome for Windows, Chrome for Mac, or Safari for Mac.”
In the unfortunate event that one uses Linux and Firefox, much like myself, is there any hope of obtaining this video?
One other thing: is the video only available online, say in a specific flash player or something?
I’m really interested in compositing so I’d really appreciate any suggestions.
@blendercomp
yes, you cannot download the video, you can only stream it through their player which sucks really.. not everyone has a 24/7 high speed connection
Your Browser is not supported at this time. We can’t guarantee all features. Please use Google Chrome for Windows, Chrome for Mac, or Safari for Mac.
o’cmon, i use firefox. i want to buy this
@blendercomp & @finally:
I guess you are trying to view this with the new HTML5 player. That indeed does not work with Firefox 3.x. I think if you try Firefox4 beta or Chrome it should work. But what will work most definitely is when you switch from html5 to Flash, which you can do in the upper right corner. I have it running here on Ubuntu 10.10 and it works flawlessly. i know about the issues with just online availability, but if you look at sites like digital-tutors or lynda.com, that’s also only online players, AFAIK. For me that works fine, and I have a rather weak connection.
@blendercomp & finally
The cmivfx site works fine for me with chromium and ubuntu.
@ Author of tutorial
I am really surprised about the quality of the composit in this video. Did some work with after effects and nuke lately. Looks like blender is somewhere in the middle of those both for vfx shots. Never expected blender could do this good. Really cool stuff!
@Sebastian,
ok, tried Chromium and I confirm that it works on Kubuntu 10.10.
I must say that the fact that it’s only available through online streaming sucks big time though! :((((
What happens if I’m not online or if I’ve got a slow connection?
When I buy something I tend to see it as “my property”. As it stands, I’m buying an educational/training service of some sort not an actual video. Very inconvenient to say the least.
If this wasn’t so darn interesting I would have never considered buying it in the first place.
Please consider another model for selling your incredible work.
@Dominik,
Which specific features does the Blender compositor need to incorporate before it becomes commercially viable?
Everything that you do is so neat, I cannot believe that you
push blender to that limit, You are definetly one of the
Great Blender Artist just like Tony.M, Andy.G Andrew P. Kernon.D
Would you consider doing free tutorials?
You use to do them, we did an amazing tutorial on curves.
Andrew.P and Kernon.D are giving away great tutorials for free,
And thank to them my business is growing so every single training
material that they sell, I buy them with my eye close.
Please consider it as Your work is next to nothing.
Carry on your Great Work, it is Simply Amazing.
@Chrome Monkey
i think the blender compositor is on a really good way in becoming a fairly handy alternative to the commercial applications.
what i miss the most is
the ability to easily mask things out
a really good keyer to use with imported real world footage
and
a live viewer not just a backdrop for checking all the modfications someone made
It’s true, there are a few things missing.
As already mentioned, better rotoscoping tools would be nice. For example curves&masks integrated into the image-editor, and better yet, the image editor embedded into the node-editor, so that it would replace the backdrop and you’re able to work with curves right inside the backdrop/node-editor and take advantage of the pixel-information overlay (RGBAZ-values).
Something that would really be helpful is if there would be some kind of representation of the alpha-channel in the backdrop. Currently you cannot really tell if there is transparency or not just by looking at the backdrop. The usual checker-board would do it. Maybe as an option.
The keying tools are actually quite good. You just must not use them isolated. Combined with blur, curves, SeparateYCbCrA and ColorSpill they are in fact quite powerful.
But as a general note I think that you shouldn’t look at the compositor as a separate tool. The key feature is the integration of real 3D, which is really a big strength and kind of unique. Particles, Smoke, CameraMapping, MattePainting and raytracing are PART OF Blender’s compositor, because they are part of Blender itself.
I would not see Blender’s compositor as a replacement of other commercial tools. It’s always as just one tool amongst others.
I mean, even though it can in fact replace some of these tools and help you get things done without having to invest in expensive programs, I would never never suggest to actually ditch Nuke or AfterEffects for it. When you have access to these tools, use them! Especially if you are mainly dealing with footage, doing color grading and rotoscoping. Then these tools are usually faster, more advanced with better features. BUT: They do not have certain things Blender has. That’s why Blender can be a really great addition to them and enhance your workflow.
If you want to use Blender in a compositing pipeline you can use it do export the 3D content. You can use it export 3D masks. You can pre-compose renderings and compositions to test if certain things would work. You can export these pre-comps as dpx-sequence etc. etc.
Again, the focus of Blender’s compositor is 3D. And it is prefect for that. And way way better than AfterEffects in that regard.
If your focus is mainly to deal with life footage then other packages are certainly much more user-friendly and faster.
Although Blender can do surprisingly many things which you wouldn’t expect. And if not, than there’s a workaround for that ;-)
@pixnlove:
Thanks man!
Funny enough that by the time you wrote this there was already a free tutorial in the making. It was the first thing I did right after finishing this one :-)
I think it is just waiting for approval of blendercookie.com. Otherwise I’ll publish it on my site.
I’ll also continue on producing free tutorials from time to time, but not such extensive ones as this. You know, cmiVFX are paying rather good, and that is the main reason i work for them. I need money. Producing a tutorial like this one takes me 1-3 months. If I cannot live from the income of that I cannot do it.
@Sebastian,
I purchased the tutorial and was eager to watch it but there was this message: “Please wait for the video to load… For some connections this could take some time”.
Considering that I’m on a gigabit network connection and I’ve been trying to view this since about 10:00 this morning, what next?
Can anyone else out there confirm that it works with Chromium on Linux (Kubuntu 10.10 to be more precise)?
@blendercomp
Ok, I can confirm that it doesn’t seem to load on Chromium. Which sucks big time, i know.
But please try the Flash-player. That does work. I tested on Ubuntu 10.10 with flashplugin-nonfree. No problems there.
I am sorry for the inconvenience!
I would like to ask you to report a bug on their site, or get in touch with their support. I am only responsible for the content, but not for their site.
I hope that flash will work for you.
@blendercomp
I use “Chrome” as my web browser, and I get the same message —> Just press the “Play” button and the movie should load a few seconds later.
No problem with Safari 5 but when I tried the flash player, the video was not there, only free stuff.
The cursus is very very good and very cheap for what it has to offer.
If you follow it in a classroom, you willl have to spend at least 2 days (breaks, questions,etc…) and pay much much more (2-300 €/day). I did it a couple years ago to learn Fusion and that was more a read of the manual with some very basic exercices.
I forgot to mention that this course gives you the knowledge, the understanding, a workflow and solutions.
Thank you Sebastian.
Chromium does not work on Kubuntu Maverick.
I ended up viewing it through Chromium on windoze using virtualization. I cannot possibly tell you how much this sucks really: flash on xp takes up about 90% of the cpu and the laptop fan keeps spinning like hell to cool the system down.
The videotutorial is really superb. However, I *urge* Sebastian to try some other hosting service.
I don’t plan to buy anything from cmivfx anymore. I’m very old fashioned and want full control of whatever it is that I buy, i.e. access to the video offline and not through their stupid streaming service/player combo.
Just my 0.02$
@blendercomp:
I’m really sorry for that. But just out of interest: did you actually try flash on linux? For me that works really good.
Please write your issues to cmiVFX. They need to be aware of any issues!
Btw., I am not using cmiVFX as a hosting service, i get paid by them. And one side-aspect of working for them is that I think that way i may get a bit more attention by users of other, commercial software for Blender. Think of it as some kind of product placement in a store where usually all the Max/Houdini/Nuke/Toxik-people buy. If there is a shiny nice Blender-product, maybe they consider having a second look at our beloved software.
Ok, that might be naive thinking but maybe that way we can reach out to the industry a bit more. I don’t know.
@Sebastian
yes, tried flashplugin as suggested but to no avail. The video wouldn’t load.
I’m not sure writing to cmivfx will make a difference: if I’m the only one complaining then they will conveniently ignore me. Already contacted them about this issue and still no response.
I understand that you make choices for certain reasons. If you think that you can promote Blender to non Blender users by making tutorials on such a high profile site then that’s fine with me. I’m just not gonna by stuff from them as a service anymore.
Thanx for making such a comprehensive and fascinating tutorial btw! :-)))
Well I still can’t get it to work. When I click on Add To Cart, all I get is a blank screen. Even after selecting the flash compatibility icon, at least I assume that’s what it was. Everything works up until there, but it’s the Add To Cart that returns an error screen.
Scratch that, just got it after finalizing updates.
Success! Thanks!
This is so very interesting! But I would like to see some example parts from the course, trailer is too fast to see the way of education, though it seems rich and promising…
@Chrome Monkey:
I’m glad it works! :-)
@Nennad:
Unfortunately I cannot show you examples of the course, but here’s a review, that Terry Wallwork kindly wrote: http://www.adventuresinblender.com/
If you just want to see my way of teaching, you may look here: http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/10/25/building-blender-in-osx/
Cheers!
Seb
@Nethan: this tutorial greately surpases similar materials in quality (e.g. Roger Wikes’ Lynda.com tutorials and Andrew Price’s wow factor). The treatment of all topics covered is very thorough. I second Wallwork’s review and highly recommend the tutorial.
Needless to say that the only drawback is the streaming involved.
@Sebastian: more of this please! :-)
So many positive comment on this tutorial…
Hum Sebastian it seems like you have meeting everyone
expectations.(as usual)
Ok one more comment like the one above,
and I will buy in.
Looks very promising, but the streaming aspect worries me. I live in Africa and although I am very tempted to buy it, there are risks that I won’t be able to access this in the streaming format.
Is there no chance for you to make a dvd and sell it through the Blender shop? I am sure that plenty of people will buy it. Or else similar material (compositing in blender + syntheyes) on Blendercookie?
Please continue the good work!