#TheMetalDogArticleList #MetalInjection
DETHKLOK's BRENDON SMALL Weighs In On A.I.'s Impact On Entertainment
"I have played with A.I., with prompts and everything, and it's just insane."
Elle bosse principalement avec des outils non libres (Nuke) mais parfois sous Linux et est ouverte à d'autres logiciels (du moment qu'on lui laisse le temps d'apprentissage).
What I like about this #Compositing tutorial is that it not only shows good-looking shots that illustrate the point he's making, but also an example of a shot that doesn't work well (without pointing fingers).
That, and it doesn't try to cram many principles of image composition into it. It's mostly about contrast and detail to get the viewer to look at the desired spots.
Unfortunately, the way I'm doing it, they are shadeless billboard objects, and for some reason I don't entirely understanding they show up as black on the "shadow" render pass, so when the shot gets composited, they are really dark -- almost silhouettes (you can see them in the background in this shot, particularly on the left).
I suspect I can fix this by adjusting the composting nodes. I was generating a "billboards alpha" mask as part of my ink-drawing wrokflow, So I might be able to tie that into my color rendering.
Or it may be that the shadow pass has an alpha channel that I'm not using.
I just rendered a better example. And I have some breakdown for it.
The first image is the "pre-composite" -- that's a PNG image that I spit out of the rendering process to give a quick look at the way things are going, using the default ink+paint compositing.
The 2nd image is the "base color" image. This has some of the render passes (shadow, in particuler) missing, because they are stored in separate layers in the output EXR image.
The 3rd image is the base "ink" image, against a white background for clarity (the ink layer is actually transparent). There is some compositing magic that removes the ink lines for stuff that should be "behind" the billboard characters.
The "real" output from my renders is a "Multilayer EXR stream" -- that is, a long series of numbered EXR image files. This format can store multiple image layers that can then be tweaked and assembled during the compositing phase.
What I normally have been sharing are the "pre-composite" PNG images, which are really just a preview I generate during rendering, using a default compositing setup.
(I am NOT actually asking for help to solve this, and I haven''t given enough information in any case. I'm sure I'll manage. This is just to give you a peek at what I'm working on).
However, if anyone feels a desire to chime in with an explanation of why the Blender Internal "Shadow" pass generates intense colors like this red, that might be helpful. I have never understood what's going on with that!
Also, this clearly shows that the shadow pass is the culprit. It seems to be because these are "shadeless" objects. But it's not what I would expect it to do. I would expect those areas to have no shadow, or possible for the alpha layer from the shadow pass to mark them as 'transparent' so that it would have no effect.
So as not to leave anyone hanging, I do appear to have solved this.
I'd feel better if I fully understood how I fixed it, but mostly it was a matter of re-applying my "ink/paint" script to set up the compositing for the two shots. Which means, I must have found and fixed this problem back when I wrote that.
The confusing thing is that I don't see what I changed, and I just overwrote the "wrong" version, so I may never know what I did wrong.
I did find some other problems and fixed those.
Anyway, the important thing is that it is working now.
I therefore declare these two shots Good Enough™ and will be moving on. #Blender#Compositing
I'm starting to build the ink+paint compositing stage of my pipeline. This shows the separate ink and paint layers, composited from the EXR renders, compared to the pre-composited output.
The goal will be to make it easy to do touch-up work and effects on ink and paint layer separately, then combine those into the "post-composite" output, which will be the final animation.