I don’t know how many of you have seen this, but compositing in Blender is about to get a whole lot better - well beyond what we’ve been playing with in CVS versions. See these partial release notes for upcoming version 2.43 here:
Does anyone on this forum know the who’s or what’s responsible for the recent Quantum leap in Blender’s development cycle? I wouldn’t be surprised if George Lucas has a hand in this, as he is directly responsible for 3D animation technology and openexr development. I understand that goolgle has been making grants via their “Summer of Code” and that Elephant’s Dream attracted a lot of attention. At the rate that this software is advancing it may not be much longer before it becomes self aware, determines that humans are virulent, and begins plotting our destruction.
Render passes has been mentioned three or four times in threads already. But no one yet showing how to use it to our advantage, just shouting out ‘render passes look here’ and here. But no substance to the posts. So I’m still working out how to use them, like many i guess. Googling helps.
I think the multilayer exr etc stuff will be here before 2.44, i hope so anyway, as i’d prefer to mess with the render passes in say cinepaint or photoshop with the openexr plugin rather than through nodes, but then it’s all new to me.
What i like the sound of on the bf-committers list is talk of material ID’s like in Max to Combustion where you don’t have to re render an image to change the materials on the objects within it, like you can do in combustion i believe. That sounds cool.
The Outliner additions are good too although i don’t like the way object and mesh toggle, if you click on an object in the outliner and then the mesh it changes to edit mode, but clicking on the object doesn’t toggle it back to object mode, you have to click on the mesh again in the outliner to switch to object mode, i don’t get that. Also i notice the refl and refr are mixed up between the render panel and the outliner, clicking on refl in the outliner turns refr on on the render panel, that’s in the latest CVS build 09-12-06, but it’s no big problem.
You are so paranoid. We will…err…it will only start rendering pictures of Humans, just to animate them so we can…er…so IT can make us jump around like stupid monkeys.
Make multilayer exr files a (animation) render output option.