Tracking

Siggraph 2017

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I’m not sure if this was my 4th or 5th Siggraph. I’ve been attending the conference since I began using Blender professionally, invited by Ton to help work the booth and chat with people about using Blender for visual effects. Siggraph become one of the highlights of my year. I’ll be completely honest with you, though – I’m probably not the best person to write about Siggraph. I do not take full advantage of the convention. I don’t go to talks, don’t attend the parties, don’t get to visit every booth on the exhibit floor, and I don’t pick up a Pixar teapot. (more…)

Creating a Matte Painted shot in Blender

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A few months ago, I was excited to once again contribute to 3DArtist magazine. This time I was asked to write a piece involving set extensions, which of course means matte painting. I hired an actress and headed right out to shoot something that could be open to lots of different creative interpretations! The printed article (and what was offered for download) was limited by space, but I thought it was a fun tutorial so I really wanted to go over all the details here on the blog and take it even further. (more…)

Exporting a Blender Scene to Nuke

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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…)

DeShaker in VirtualDub

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As we continue exploring ways to stabilize footage, we’re going to take a look at a plugin for VirtualDub called DeShaker. I’m betting you never heard of VirtualDub, right? (more…)

Blender – Stabilizer Improvements & Muzzle Flash

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If you’ve tried to stabilize footage in Blender at any point since the inclusion of tracking tools during the production of Tears of Steel, you may have noticed a large, glaring omission – scale. Translation and rotation, no problem. But we have not been able to stabilize scale in Blender at all.

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Smoothing Camera Motion in Blender

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Handheld camera work is very common today, but if you’re out there shooting your own movies, sometimes you may find your footage has a high frequency shake that is just really annoying. I’ve found that the smaller the camera is, the more chance there is of introducing that jittery motion. With people shooting movies on smartphones and GoPros, cameras really can’t get much smaller! That means there is a lot of high frequency jitter in those handheld shots. (more…)

Blender screen replacement & marker removal

Lately I’ve been doing more and more for 3DArtist magazine. I got to meet editor Steve Holmes at Siggraph last year, and since then, he keeps inviting me back to do more fun compositing tutorials in Blender, which of course is a pleasure.

This is one I did for them in Issue 88. I wanted to introduce people to the idea that Blender isn’t only a 3D program, but could be used in place of Nuke or After Effects for most compositing tasks. One of the simplest and most common jobs is replacing a screen on a device. Monitors, phones, tablets, televisions, this technique works for any of those. It also works for anything flat in general, like billboards, walls, floors, replacing book covers, photographs, etc.