Blender’s compositor is an immensely powerful tool. If I didn’t know better I’d be inclined to think it was Turing-complete.
I have been exploring some of those possibilities in trying to create a “cloning” effect–like Multiple Man from the X-Men, where you have more than one of the same actor on the screen at any given time. For this test I went for the effect seen in Wolverine & the X-Men episode 12: “eXcessive Force”.
While it’s a decent effect for an animated cartoon like that, I think there are better ways to transition the “clones” into the scene. However I only decided that after I finished the clip (to my satisfaction) and called it quits. Here it is, for what it’s worth.
I think that the video shown uses green screen shots, but if you have to create masks,
some time ago I created a ready to use setup for both Rotoscoping and Garbage Painting.
Roubal, that tutorial is exactly the way I did it–though my nodes setup was a little more complicated because of all the different animated layers I was using. I had I think five different masks and six layers. Thanks!
It was. For that 8-second clip I spent probably at least as many hours working on it, though a lot of that would have been figuring out how to do it (and doing the wrong thing and backtracking to figure it out). I think I could do it significantly faster now that I’ve gotten the workflow down. That’s the thing with rotoscoping–you want to get in the groove and then keep going as long as you can, rather than trying to do little bits at a time. You’ll be more efficient that way because it will sort of “flow”. Kind of like writing in a way.
Next on the agenda is figuring out the Blender 2.5 smoke simulator. My production buddies want explosions.
A while back I performed the same trick with my kid, but used After Effects. Instead of Chroma keying I used an Invert(?) key, that subtracts from a clean plate of the background. This is something that Blender can do given a low compression source.
