In the following video I describe a brief history of troubles that we, as 3d compositors, ran into whenever working with old layer passes system, clown passes, masks and unpremult alpha channels.
For those of you who don´t know what horrible fate compositors faced before deadlines, let's check out why Cryptomatte was a much needed life saver in a Blender-based studio pipeline. Next week I´ll be talking about how you can take more advantage of this amazing function from other workflows as well..
Enjoy and share!
Transcript:
This video training will focus on the Blender 2.8 Compositor and some of the techniques used professionally to enhance the quality of the render images.
We´ll briefly go through one of the key nodes in this moment called Cryptomatte, and how it will help us to accomplish a basic color correction onto the blasted rock.
But first, let's review common pitfalls for a compositor. One thing a compositor should always look out for are EDGES. They are 1 or 2 pixel halo oultines that break the illusion of seamless integration. Noise severely damages the composite layers and let's keep in mind alpha transparency means you gotta have pixel perfect cutouts of your passes, masks or mattes. This is known as premult factor. It´s a headache to have to fix alpha transparency first and integrate it with other scene element renders or passes specially on tight deadlines and human error renders.
If we create masks on an object while using the compositor, it will take more time than if it was isolated as an element by itself. Let aside the fact that masks consume constant render representation and are heavy to calculate for the Blender Compositor.
Frame one is finished, only 249 frames more to go...
So to isolate objects and materials the "clown pass" or "ID matte" pass was a necessity on Cycles, but this brought to the table the ability to override the original materials, separating them on pass layers, which by the way are different than RENDER layers. A convoluted method for the new user and some experienced people as well...
Psyop its a huge post production studio with some lead technical directors or creating state of the art visuals for commercial advertising and movies. It used to be a Softimage studio, but since EOL they moved entirely to Maya.
Here's an example of a crytomatte render from Maya to Nuke to specifically embellish any render element from the scene in post production. A true life saver.
Stefan Werner one of the technical members of Tangent Animation ported the open source code to Blender last year on their own version of Blender, and just this week was released as a core function on Blender 2.8, so THANK YOU TANGENT ANIMATION AND STEFAN!!
Cryptomatte in Blender can immediately create masks to isolate an element or material so we can work directly with a picker on the compositor to choose over what rendered element we would like to work. So let's check out the possibilities in the following training session...
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