anybody know of good tutorials to explain composting? there seems to be so many affects, like after effects adding grunge maps and color grading,and so on. here is some things I am talking about but I can’t really find all the steps of what composting is and things you can do such as dust particles, blur and so on. I did put this post in textures as well but that post had more questions about baking and stuff. so here is my composting question.
great tutorials I found so far on trying to learn these affects for composting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCD7jnDJNpc
anybody know of goof tutorials to explain the node better? i mean, I would like to know which each node does and it's affect to learn for composition. thanks in advance for any answers you may have.
and I guess from there I will know since you said my question is to genral.
I dont know much and maybe this tutorial will help.
when I watch people demos and their breakdowns. they show, rim, key light, dust particles, color,grade, blur ,bloom effect, field of depth etc. so maybe this tutorial will give me a feel for it. i just wish there was a list of what composition is or what you can do with it. seems like tutorials are in parts. for an example baking. well what does it do? I see tutorials on light baking, texture baking, normal maps, etc and it’s like…give me a list so i can know what I would like to know since it seems people do certain steps in what they want for there project and I don’t know what other things you can do with that subject. like hdr lighting and textures, if you used those and in programs such as Photoshop, do you still need to do color grade and stuff. you know? it’s like things are in pieces. i know there is so much to learn but would be great to know the steps like a book content in chapters of a book.
another example is nodes. there tutorials on diffuse, glossy and some other things, but there a whole list of nodes that do things and not each one is explained and what settings you need to know. do you do color correction before or during composting with the rgb curve.
for another example is this . look at the complete course outline in this page.
now it goes over some things but then look at these demo reel I found online, the textures, I think a bloom effect, with camera lens layers maybe and so on.
Compositing is generally a cheat. You are mixing images together in an easier way than doing it all in 3D view. Also compositing allows you to make efficient changes after rendering. Adding elements like dust or blur or light effects can be easier to achieve in 2D and quicker to change there.
Baking of all sorts is another efficiency tool. If you add textures and light a scene it may take a while to render out a good quality frame but for games and animation you can cheat the quality by baking the still frame back into the textures of the object. Then you don’t need to do a heavy render on playback. But it will loose interactivity of lighting bounces. All the other stuff like nor bakes also refer to memory saving by lowering the geometry required to get better detail etc.
HDR lights are environment replacements and typically give better results than scene lamps as they have built in variation. Guess what… it’s another cheat.
Nodes are for a range of uses in Blender from materials to compositing and now modeling and animation (see new addons). To make best use of them I suggest that you run through some tutorials and make stuff end to end. That way you can learn how to apply stuff and what to expect. Later when you have a speciifc problem you will know what to ask about here or over at the Blender Stack Exchange (great questions clearing house).
The best way to learn is just to play around with them one at a time. For color grading, I like the Color Balance node. Some people prefer the RGB Curves node, but I find the color wheels of the Color Balance node more intuitive. The Lift refers to shadows, Gamma is midtones, and Gain is highlights. Outdoors, shadows tend to have a bluish tint because blue light is more easily scattered than the other colors of the spectrum. So give the shadows a bit of blue. Things in direct sunlight will be a bit warmer, so give the Gain a little yellow.
The grayscale sliders along each color wheel are like the Levels adjustment in Photoshop. They allow you to control how dark or light the shadows, midtones, and highlights are.