Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, we only had to set a few opions for Blender's rendering engine to take the composed
video from the Video Sequence Editor and render it straight into a nicely compressed AVI file
using the H.264 codec, which offers quite a good quality and high compression.
Classified Intel
The Video Sequence Editor works by represening fragments of video as strips; as we have
seen before, there are different types of strips (even audio strips), and each individual strip
must live in a specific channel. Blender treats channels like layers that are being seen from
top to botom; depending on the paricular blend mode of a speciic strip, the ones below
it could or could not be visible. If we take this into account, it's easy to see that the two
cross-effect strips added are the ones that are being rendered by Blender (in the frames
where they exist), but they just perform the task of taking informaion from the two strips
involved in the transiion and generaing the resuling image at each frame. For the custom
transiion between the image sequences we just used the Alpha Over blend mode, which
uses the alpha informaion of the upper strip to decide how much of the strip below it to let
"pass-through". The premuliply opion for these strips is just needed for Blender to convert
the data format of the individual pixels into the right one, to be used by the Video Sequence
Editor correctly.
Mission Accomplished
In this project, we had the opportunity to learn a simple but very efecive technique to get
a nice studio setup. By using a simple seing in the material opions for the loor plane of
the template scene, the shadow can be seen without having to see explicitly the object that
is receiving it. We also worked with a light setup in which the shadows were separated from
the actual lighing, so that we can control them separately and have a greater control.
Since we have the append mechanism to copy informaion between blend iles, it was quite
easy to just create a template scene and then copy (append) it into new ones, thus saving ime.
As a sneak peak of how much flexibility we have in Blender, we used an animated texture to
drive the alpha channel of the template scene by using the Node Editor. Applying the same
principle, it's just a mater of using any of the tools available in Blender (animaion, physics
simulaion, paricles simulaion, and so on) to get a cool, new transiion that can be used in
the Video Sequence Editor.
One of the most important aspects of our demo reel is showing the mesh structure of the
objects, so we just used a material of wire type and applied a simple trick using the Z Offset
parameter to get a nicely shaded wire just over the object being rendered.
