What is compositing?

Hey there,
I started with my Google search. Read a few summaries and watched a few videos. Unfortunately I am still confused as to if my project falls under the compositing category.

I created a 3D model, unwrapped it, added a texture to it, then I added lighting and effects to it. It’s one single frame.

I feel this is compositing but I also made a model… So I don’t know. My goal is to upload projects to SheepIt render farm but they do not handle compositing.

Compositing in its classical sense is taking a bunch of premade 2d images and combining them to get a result. Think in the lines of filming a spaceship model separately and combining it with a nice drawing of some alien planet. Modeling, lighting and rendering a 3d model is not compositing in this sense as you are still in the process of creating the source elements for compositing, but that does not mean you can’t do it in some comp software.

All render farms that run blender also do blender compositing, renderfarm itself does not give a flying duck what Blender is doing. You just have to pack all used data together with blend file so that it is available to farm servers.

Compositing is “the perfect Digital Darkroom” … a place far more exact than the actual “dark room” in my house where I still love to spend a lot of my time. :yes:

A very famous photographer, Ansel Adams, once very-correctly observed that “A photograph is captured in the camera, but it is made in the darkroom.” This was true when photographers such as Ansel or O. Winston Link were practicing their trade using noxious chemicals and silver compounds, and it is still true today.

The term, “compositing,” actually refers to the entire sequence of processes(!) that might be applied to one or more “photog… 'scuse me, render outputs,” on the way to producing the final image that the popcorn-munching audience member will finally, actually, see.

The term most-directly refers to the idea that any finished frame might consist of a sort-of “sandwich” of pieces of imagery that actually were produced at different times. (For instance, if an ogre is dragging his knuckles across the floor of a dungeon, and the camera isn’t moving, then we really only need to render one copy of the dungeon. We can separately-render and then superimpose our ogre, along with any shadows that he casts.)

But, in the larger sense, the term is also applied to “anything else that needs to occur ‘down-stream.’” Both photography and its digital equivalent, rendering, are truly only the first steps of the eventual magic.

“Sssshhh! Don’t spill any of this to the good souls who still use the term, ‘photo-realism!’ They don’t need, or even want, to know…” :wink:

the short answer: post processing.

On the website of sheepit I read this:

The split of frames depends of the render engine.
With Blender Internal, the split is achieved with the border feature, each frame is split with a chessboard motif. It’s simple and effichiant but it does not support compositing.
With Cycles, the split creates “layers”, each frame is rendered with samples lower to 1/n and a different seed. Them recomposed with 100%, 50%, 33%, 100/n % opacity to generate the final image. This method has the main advantage to support the compositing but it does not support variation of sample amount throught lpo.

In blender compositing means everything what is done in the compositor. (node editor > nodetree: compositing) like as shown here:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]486506[/ATTACH]

But as I read the above text in italics, I am not sure if sheepit uses the term compositing differently. You better ask them.

If you change the texture after rendering the 3D model (using the UV coordinates) then that is a composite job (mixing images into a single new image).

If you use other images in the the 3D render at time of render then this is NOT compositing.