Foundation Blender Compositing

I’m so excited to let you know that my book is in printing and should be shipping at the end of the month. It is available to order from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, etc. I’ll start this thread to answer any questions or comments.

The link is http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Blender-Compositing-Roger-Wickes/dp/1430219769/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246069880&sr=8-5 .

The book was budgeted to be 500 pages total, (whew!~) and has about 450 written/illustrated pages and then the index, table of contents, etc. It is in FULL COLOR, and includes a DVD with over 4Gb of files and exercises and professional stock video, including a lot from Orange and Peach - mattes, backdrops, textures, etc.

I wrote the book to fill the gap in the Blender “library” of books; mine addresses all the special effects processing, masking, and practical uses for every node, and in-depth on the latest sequencer, to use Blender in a video production pipeline/environment. Tony’s book fully explores character animation and fluids and cloth, so I do not spend one page on those. Rolands and Carsten’s books address modeling, and For Dummies is a good reference overall.

I focus on film and video production and post-production, and what Blender supports and how-to do all those neat effects, including camera matching, lip-sync, match-moving, etc. to get your Blender models “integrated” over a live action plate. It was more work than I dreamed, all nights/weekends/days etc, both by myelf, Roland, and my editorial team (I had like two editors review everything) so hopefully the global community will buy it and we can all be compensated for our efforts.

If you see a rip-off site with any of the Blender books, please alert me or the appropriate author so we can all fight piracy, and allow money to flow toward future editions (like to match up to 2.5 when it is released).

Thanks for the hard work Roger. I am going to order mine in a bit. These areas of Blender are often overlooked and it will be nice to have a single resource in hand to go from. How indepth does it go with file formats? That is something I’ve struggled with in the past.

Congratulations!
Thanks for your hard work. I’ve been hoping for a book on these topics.

P. Monk

Nice one, PapaSmurf.
Congratulations on finishing it. This is a much overlooked area of Blender, and it seems to be one of its major strengths. I ordered my copy today.
I hope all that effort pays off for you!

Ordered mine yesterday. I’m looking forward to this one, that’s for sure!

Wow… this one sure fills a much needed gap. Thanks for it.

I will most probably get it when it comes to the local bookstore.

I used to watch all your node tutorials on vimeo. for all of you who doesn’t know about it papa smurf has some videos on vimeo on blender compositing nodes.

http://www.vimeo.com/969744

Check them out! Really easy to learn from. So besides Venom lab i need to buy this when I get this months sallary ^^

yeah, I stumbled across this book on amazon a while ago, and have been looking forward to this! congrats- hope it does really well- this is on my next book to buy list for sure

Thanks for the support everyone, and aermartin for posting the link to my vids. I’ve presold 26 as of a few days ago, yay! I’m seriously now considering some youtube vids and going for partner on youtube (my daughter already is, so I have to keep up with the kids, you know). The vimeo vids have had over 20000 plays, so they have been very successful.

Can’t wait to pre-order once I get paid!

When I order from Amazon they don’t charge my card till it ships. So you could probably pre-order it now. You shouldn’t get charged till it comes out.

Just got my copy in the mail. Looking foward to digging into it.

ok found the book on Amazon Uk here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Foundation-Blender-Compositing-R-Wickes/dp/1430219769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248979635&sr=1-1

But it lacks any detail about description about it’s contents…

I’ve uploaded the full table of contents to my ftp server, so Rambo et al, if you want to see exactly what is in the book, please use my compositor ftp account. Using your ftp manager, the host is ftp.rogerwickes.com, and the login is [email protected] with a password of “password”. the pdf is in the home directory.

The DVD is 4GB of data and files, lots from BBB and ED, but also sample green screen, professional footage, and every image used in every exercise in the book.

Again, thanks everyone!

Normally I would have waited to buy this book until it was available through the Blender e-shop, but this I can’t wait to read :slight_smile: I’ve only worked with compositing for 1½ years now, and recently my workplace changed to Nuke, and I haven’t really dug into the compositing or sequencer in Blender, so I look forward to see what’s possible and how it’s done. Thanks and congratulations PapaSmurf!

You’re welcome, San.

Everyone: a reader asked that I provide a desktop like the one shown in Figure 1-1, and so I have at my ftp site. It is an all-in-one screen layout. The filename is 1-desktop.blend, and you can download it using the [email protected] password login.

John sent in the following miscellaneous mistakes in the book that I should let you know about:

p83:

  • the texture path “textures/world/roadsign.jpg” seems to be “/lib/images/Places/roadsign welcome to MS.JPG”
  • the instructions say to start up from your .B.blend and load the image to the perspective camera, but there is only the orthographic in the default scene provided. Since the image you are compositing over was taken with a perspective camera, change the camera to a perspective one.

p84

  • The file provided on DVD does not have any of the images embedded, nor can it find them to load (because it is an absolute path on myHD), so it just opens with blue plane. You should load them from the DVD by clicking the folder icon.
  • The file has two scenes, “Mask” and “NASA”
  • The file has additional planes named “Plane” and “Roadsign.001” as well as the expected “Roadsign”.

Here are a few more:

p85

  • Might not want to tell the user to “Poke the 3d view” as that changes cursor loc. Rolling over it is enough for it to get focus.
  • Text does not appear in Edit mode in v2.49
  • Text needs to be rotated 90 along X
  • typo “working i” should be “working in”
  • “Add>Render Current Frame” should be “Render>Render Current Frame”.
  • “Current Frame” should also be red.
  • Figure 3-31 shows colored text, default material is not colored

Regards,
John

BTW, I’m enjoying the book. It’s great to see this in-depth coverage of this aspect of Blender. The book is organized very nicely attractively laid out (maybe with the exception of line length of body copy). I think it has valuable info for all Blender users. Highly recommended!

Regards,
John

I’m thinking about buying this… Maybe I’ll some money left after Christmas.