
Keentools Facebuilder for Blender is out of beta testing and is officially released! It’s had some updates, and Keentools has even posted a 50% code that’s good until March 5, 2020.
(more…)Keentools Facebuilder for Blender is out of beta testing and is officially released! It’s had some updates, and Keentools has even posted a 50% code that’s good until March 5, 2020.
(more…)Since starting this blog, I’m emailed a couple times a week by people asking for advice about the VFX industry. I’m usually asked:
Today we’re going to take a quick look at matchmoving objects – but not by tracking multiple features and solving for the camera and object. Basically, not the normal way you would expect. This is how to hack and cheat matchmoving things that have no markers.
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If you’ve seen my presentation from the 2017 Blender Conference, you saw a transition effect I did for the TV show “Star” (check out 15:45 minutes into my presentation). The director wanted a transition into the mind of an actress to show what she’s thinking about, and described it as if a pencil is poking through from inside her head, and then the frame tears apart from that point, revealing the next shot underneath. (more…)
I attended my third Blender Conference this year. Third! That’s crazy! I remember before I had ever gone to one, wondering what it was like, how fun it must be to be around that many Blender users, what Amsterdam is like, what the Blender Institute is like. And now it’s the place I’ve been to the most outside of my own country! (more…)
In a pleasant turn of events, it just so happens that both Ton Roosendaal and Andrew Price are here in Los Angeles for a few weeks, both working on different business-related things. With Colin Levy now a local resident, we all couldn’t resist getting together at a local Taiwanese restaurant for a fun evening. (more…)
The 2017 Creative Arts Emmys happened last week, and CoSA VFX, where I work, brought home some wins this year! (more…)
Finally, I’ve finished this up and I’m getting it out there! The first Natron tutorial for OpenVisualFX. If you haven’t heard of Natron, it’s an open source compositing program very similar to Nuke. In fact, it’s similar enough that if you know one, you know the other. I wanted to come up with a fun scene with some relatively standard compositing work, the kind of thing an artist at a professional studio is going to be doing all the time, and the TNT television show The Last Ship gave me the perfect opportunity. (more…)
Wow. Sometimes you think something will be easy and automatic, and then reality steps in and yells “Nope!” right in your face. This is one of those common things a compositor runs into almost daily – using a vector pass from a 3D program to add motion blur in post. Using a vector pass speeds up the 3D rendering and lets the compositor make adjustments to the motion blur without having to re-render any 3D elements.
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If you’re going to use Blender in a professional environment, especially to compliment your work as a compositor (as I do), then moving your 3D scene from Blender and into The Foundry’s Nuke is more or less a necessity at some point. Thankfully, this has gotten much easier than it used to be. (more…)