Week 5 - Blender Compositing

This is a fairly new topic to the Blender community, though it's been done in the past, rarely have the tools available been sophisticated enough to composite live footage with digital footage as easily as it is now.

Now with the new features such as motion tracking and sweet core rendering improvements, one can finally use real footage and comp it with digital without enormous amounts of work.

The above video is a good example of the breakdown when using the blender program. The video is breakdown of the following one:

While the actual composite would need a bit more work as there is a bit of telltale saturation and contrast issues with different lighting in the scenes, that's easy to rectify. The salient point is that now there is a free alternative to the current industry heavyweights that has actually started to be useful for vfx work.

Blender has long been the underdog in the 3D world thanks to a pipeline that is somewhat difficult to integrate into a studio environment. While this is still an issue, the gap is rapidly closing as various studios start to stagnate between their nearly releases with nominally decent upgrades sometimes, and other times not so much. Sometimes even a reversion.

This is in stark contrast to Blender's constant and astounding rate of improvement. Features and versions are updated on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly basis. Thanks to a thriving open source community, this is one of the few examples of open source software actually working. Not only has it stayed lightweight and usable, but has continued to mature and develop features that, while rarely completely rivaling their purist counterparts (Nuke is obviously a better tracker and vfx program, Zbrush a far better sculpting program, and so on), it still holds up against the 3D modelling programs, and the recent render enhancements, simulation additions and other massive packages has allowed it to serve as a decent, understated option for those without thousands to shell out on mainstream packages and plugins.

A look at the blender gallery proves that the software is firmly capable of standing on it's own, but it's heartening to see that in an industry where some of the commercial counterparts aren't innovating, at least the little kid in the corner is not only innovating, but also catching up to it's big daddy's in leaps and bounds.

The question that remains is, what happens if the little kid grows up to be a legitimate contender for the throne?