Can't get simple blur to work

Hello, I followed along a simple blur tut. and was able to it to work on my simple boomerang until the very end. The tut. had a glare node that I didn’t use because I couldn’t get it to work after messing with it for an hour. But I don’t really need it. Anyway, You’ll see that I mixed two blur nodes together and instead of using the screen option like the tut. said, I couldn’t only get it to work using multiply. Then I tried to mix it with the scene layer using another mix node and I tried every option from “mix” to “linear light” and I couldn’t get it to look right. You can barley make out some features of the boomerang being smothered by the glowing band. I’ve tried adjusting everything in every node and can’t get it to come together like the tut. One note, the tut. was done in 2.5 and I’m working in 2.71. Any help in getting this to work would be greatly appreciated.

It’s a little hard to figure out what’s wrong with your comp setup because I’m not clear on what it is supposed to be doing in the first place. Could you explain a bit, and link to the tut you say you got this from?

  • never mind *

Thanks for your response. The tut. is located at http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-the-compositor/#.VCII60vL68M
I’m trying to get the blue band on the this boomerang to glow. [ATTACH=CONFIG]335613[/ATTACH]

Could try this tut which is pretty easy and straightforward:

Ok, thanks for the link to other tut. It’s using an older version that doesn’t have the same nodes on the render box as the new version of blender (2.7.1) so it doesn’t work. But using a hybrid of the two tuts ( http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials…/#.VCII60vL68M and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23yXAOvvlNw, I’m really close. But now I’m stuck on something really simple that I’ve only gotten to work once and now I can’t get to work again. Please help! When starting out I leave the main object in the first layer (the body of the boomerang) and place the band into the second layer. Then I go to the layer button to the right of the camera and add another layer and assign the band to it. Then I have to render both layers so that I can bring both up into the node compositor when I can blur one layer (the band) and mix it with the body. But I’m tried every which way of rendering with the little buttons i the layer options (next to the camera) and I CANT get blender to render just the body and the band separate. It always combines the whole boomerang together in one layer and the band in the other. If I could get that to work, i’m sure I can get the blur effect that I’m looking for. Or is this the wrong work flow? Starting to drive me nuts. Doesn’t seem that it should be this hard.

Ok, well I found an baffling work around that allowed me to finally get separate node boxes for the band and the body. I deleted the separate and original band I made that I wanted to keep because I could make it curry and sleek and instead selected the center faces of the boomerang then hit ‘p’ to separate it and create a new object. This time blender did’t throw a hissy and actually rendered the two layers with each object in a different layer. So now I set up a simple flow in the compositor using the blur node and I still can’t get the two render layers to mix at the end. Please take a look at the attached file if you get a chance.

thanks.

Ok, there’s been 266 views of this post in three days of this reply, so clearly people are looking for some basics pertaining to the blur node. I had to go to another forum, but I found out why my simple blur attempt wasn’t working. The pros might be too advanced to see the extremely simple answer- Red alert: you must render your objects with a transparency! (Notice the checkered background on the render nodes.) I’m using 2.71 with cycldes and you set the transparency in the render menu like so:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]336209[/ATTACH]

Once this is done, you can make something like this highly advanced dark energy alien transmission tower:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]336213[/ATTACH]

And now that you (we) know that the object must have a transparent background, the workflow of this tut will work to make even more advanced stuff: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-the-compositor/#.VCr2d0vL68N

To see the entire set up of the amazing transmission tower, I have attached the blender file. Hope this helps the fledgling noobs like me out there.

thanks,
TP