You’re very welcome for the nodes. Please let me know if there is something that is missing and needs to be added. Hopefully the 2.44 (or 2.5) release will have a plugin api for nodes so we don’t have to wait between release cycles for new nodes!
Cheers,
Bolb
As for the 3D compositing, it looks from the linked video that he’s demonstrating a compositor with basic 3D functionality built in. Blender is a full-on 3D app. You can set up all those planes with animated video directly in a 3D scene then render it out.
There’s some more info here 
kitsu: i agree. For example, today they told me they want a MS Producer file (powerpoint with audio) put to video. No problem I say. and texture a plane with the slide, film a talking head and texture that to a plane, and swoop it all in so you see the guy talking about his slide. very simple, but very impressive and easy, since it is all in one file. For fun and effect, I might just use a text object for his bullet and bring it in through the plane and have it bobble around a little. Again, animation and rendering all in one is really neat.
Also, the studio we are using shoots green screen, and I just plug in the office background and composite it over, and we are good to go. Also, then saving that composite, and then reimporting at the texture to the plane is so easy
I’m working on the sprite thing right now, I’ll post it when done. Getting fluids to look good in the composite is fairly hard, as is waiting for them to bake!
Edit: Okay, I’ve baked my fluids like five times this morning and just now got something decent. I don’t have time to render them out right now though 
While I was waiting I did a first pass at masking out the jumper. I’m using an older version of the ‘water’ that I rendered out yesterday. It’s ugly, and the mask isn’t very good either, but that will be fixed by the next render.
I still have a ton of cleanup and tweaking to do, but I think it is pretty successful already.
Oops, I just noticed I have some leftover nodes left in there. The ‘frameone’ image is replaced by a camera-mapped plane, so the first image and mask are unnecessary…
PS: Thanks to the wiki for the time/fac blend in idea (though it doesn’t help my bad transitions very much in this version :rolleyes:).
Kitsu: Nice try, but need more work to achieve the same degree of realism like in the cmvfx tutorial.
Can this be added to Blenders Compositor and Video Editor?
http://www.debugmode.com/winmorph/
Actually Blender dont have Morphing and Warping capabilities.
Here’s a hint for forum etiquette. Don’t say Blender does not have X, until you are sure. Makes people mad. Best to be humble and ask if or how Blender does X, and let people say.
Blender is not a 2D image manipulation program, like Gimp or that morph program you referenced, BUT it does have Morph through the Displace distortion node. Using that node, you feed a vector map to say how you want the image distorted, and ramp it up to that full distortion over a timeframe for an animated morph by feeding the X and Y scale sockets.
Using that same node, you can do Warping of images, as well as shift, rotate, scale, and flip.
You can also warp an image by texturing it to a plane, and using Shape keys to animate the deformation of that plane over time, thus warping, twisting, curling, smurling, b-smurling, spinning (turntable), rolling it into a tube, whatever.
So don’t say Blender don’t do that. See the wiki on any of the above topics to learn more.
@kitsu: coming along well! good mapping to the image. Turn up your alpha so that it shows clearer and that the background image doesnt show thru the animation.
Those who would comment on Blender’s shortcomings are forgetting 2 extremely important points.
First, it’s lightweight. My After Effects, with all it’s plugins and crap, weighs in at 372mb. At this moment my Blender folder is 16.7mb. (Considering all the tutorials I’m saving off, I need all the disk space I can get.)
Second, it’s free. Gratis. “Go one, have a copy.” My version of AE is four figures to the left of the decimal, and any upgrades are likely to drain a few more pints of blood. Shake is what, $400? How much is Nuke? So “expensive and bloated”, as opposed to “free and small”, and more useful.
No brainer.
Just as an aside, while I was composing this, I removed AE from my drive. I’m not sure I’ll need it anymore. Oy, the camera I could have bought with what I paid for AE…
Whatever shortcomings Blender may or may not have is far and away dwarfed by what it can do, and goodness only knows what’s brewing in the mind(s) of the author(s). So to those who say “Blender can’t do blah”, I say “Give it time.”
I’d say go with Shake. I’ve used it quite a bit and it is just amazing. I haven’t used Blender’s composite nodes but I have checked out the nodes in general. The nodes in Blender are set up so that all the contents of a node is visible. This makes huge composites quite frustrating because you can’t fit enough on a page at a time.
Shake also has a lot more nodes and when you find the ones you want aren’t in Blender, all you’ll get is a response like ‘Blender’s free so you should be grateful you have what’s there’. This isn’t good enough when you have deadlines to meet.
Shake is fully scriptable and the saved files are just scripts so you can edit composites in a text editor. You have frame retiming and interpolation, you can overlay audio tracks for syncing, you have camera tracking tools, 32-bit/floating point image support. You have a huge set of tutorials and it’s a program that won’t let you down on the toughest of tasks. Some of the biggest films were done with Shake and if it’s good enough for them, it’ll be good enough for you.
It’s also not just a case of Blender having the features, it’s about the quality of those features too. After Effects has compositing so why doesn’t the film industry use it for film? Because Shake is better and faster. Shake uses a certain type of evaluation for nodes too so that if you have a node that applies an effect and then negates the effect, it won’t calculate it twice.
I can’t say enough good things about Shake. It’s honestly one of the best pieces of software I’ve ever used and although Apple owns it, it’s not one of those dumbed down Apple programs like iphoto or what not. It even acts like Blender with the subdivided windows.
One downside is that the undo isn’t very reliable. It also doesn’t have full 3D support but it has some. You don’t really need it in a compositor though. It’s also not a motion graphics package. No vector image support and no particle generator. Some of these things can be worked around but the fact remains that it is designed to be a compositor and it does that very well and in its class is unbeatable for the price. For TV work, After Effects is probably more appropriate. I quite liked After Effects when I used it but I prefer using nodes. For the price though, Shake is a great piece of software to have around.
I have to agree with ZombieMac. Give it time… Before you go off on how much better shake is you should really know your facts about Blender.
Since I don’t know all about blender either this should be checked out.
artisanicview:Harsh but true (and I said as much too), this was my last test render of the day and had dozens of problems yet to resolve. That said I thought the CMIVFX shot was actually kind of lame too. His mattes were just as lazy as mine, and as the guy in the tutorial said there is a lot more that can be done with a true 3d package…
As for using wink for morphing: go ahead! What makes you think you can’t use external video sources in Blender (or Shake, or whatever)? That was my point about not leaving Blender out of the loop. You don’t need to use just one or the other, and Blender would be a great asset even with Shake.
As for comparisons between the two, I don’t think it is really a fair comparison. I don’t know any specifics about Shake besides what I’ve seen in tutorials. It has some UI features that would be nice in Blender, and some specialty nodes that would be hard to recreate in Blender. Mean while Blender is Blender, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails. My only complaint so far using Blender as a compositor is that it seems incredibly slow. You need to build big node trees to get things done in Blender, but a large number of nodes take too long to process per frame (I’ve gotten around this somewhat by pre-rendering node trees to file and using the file as input).
Shake is mature while Blender is very new. Shake is proprietary while Blender is complex! The guy in the tut didn’t use Shake to make the replacement ground. He made it in Photoshop and used the result in Shake. I took his ground and mapped it to a plane in Blender instead. It would be easy enough to then use a rendered animation from Blender in Shake to replace the foreground footage. Don’t think application-centric, think about the best tool for the job 
In the end use the tools that work for you.
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I am not sure I would go so far as to say that most of the industry standard programs are living on borrowed time simply because of market factors (if software died simply because it lacked features none of us would be using Windows). Shake and AE are both excellent programs and so is Blender (I use AE for most of my compositing work, but Shake is niiiiice). I have not played with Blender’s compositor extensively so I am not an authority on it, but based on what I have seen I would not personally recommend it as someone’s primary tool for professional broadcast and film compositing just yet.
Shake and AE just seem a little more feature rich and intuitive to work with at the moment. That being said, Blender is going from strength to strength and as someone else mentioned, the compositor is new. Did anyone here ever work with the early versions of Photoshop or After Effects? They were horrible programs that didn’t do much of anything by today’s standards. A year or two from now I think all the rough edges will be smoothed out. If it’s true about plans for a really good plug-in architecture, well I think the compositor will really take off once that is in place.
I think it really is all about having the right tool for the right job. The best CG artists I have known are software agnostic and work with a whole range of applications, picking what’s best for the project and budget they are working with.
well… blender CAN do 2D morphing also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILDP3nWX1zo
that’s been done with blender. its not very easy or user friendly way todo but its possible :).
Ah very very nice!!.. Any change of a tutorial (or blend file)? :eyebrowlift:
blend file is missing and making tutorial … well… im lazy :). I used sticky keys to get morphing thing. I made “control” points (eyes, mouth etc) to plane (like modelling human head but only one direction) and used shape keys to move vertex as pic to another pic. Then when using sticky keys i only had to revert another one(plane) and animate alpha to get cross over effect. I know this is kind of hard explanation but mayby if i can find that damn blend file i could post it here or mayby if I have energy to make even video tutorial, we’ll see… not promising anything 
Kewl, I’ll give it a try when I’ve to some spear time. Now if only I knew what sticky keys are… 
Sorry for digging up a dead thread, but OpenEXR has been in Digital Fusion since version 4, and I presume it has been in Shake and Nuke even longer as Nuke is in-house tool, and it uses unlimited channels which suits OpenEXR very well. OpenEXR is even in After Effects and AE is used more for motion graphics than compositing.
About other software “living on borrowed time”, well, that’s just silly. Blender may be in competition with some packages, more directly with others than the rest, and the results of competition are lower prices and additional features to gain market advantage.
not related:
It’s general misconception amongst open source users that proprietary software will lay like fainted ducks while open source alternatives implement all of their features. But companies don’t wait in sleep while competition catches up.
They listen to their clients (well, Adobe doesn’t) who pays their salaries and implement their wishes. In commercial productions the price of software is meaningless. It’s speed and features which count.
There’s also a misconception about Shake - it’s not really a simple one-click wondernode program as that would not cut it for complicated things.
This is not to put down Blender which is really great package for most things. It’s just to point out that 3d software which can combine render passes is different from software made for motion graphics or realtime compositing. I don’t see facilities switching to XSI’s built-in compositor from NUKE.
meh, so is blender.
