SOFT WARE: BLENDER

Stephen Chalk, Cornwall

This scene by Flavio Della Tommasa (www.malapixel.com) benefits from a variety of steps including denoising in the Blender compositor

Paul Hatton replies

Compositing, strictly speaking, is the combining of multiple images to make a final single image. The results of compositing can be seen in films in which green screens have been utilised. In this type of workflow, the background is keyed out in compositing and a backplate inserted into the background. Over the years this process has become increasingly more advanced, enabling directors and artists to achieve some incredible results – but the compositing process has also become increasingly demanding. For 3D artists, compositing encompasses a whole host of corrections and edits that are made to a render before the result is finally finished. Some of this will be compositing in the strict sense of the word, and some of it would be better placed under post-production. For the purposes of a Blender workflow, this is all brought under the ‘Compositing’ stage of the project. Blender gives you everything you need to assemble and edit both rendered images and video. It is also possible for the parameters of these compositing nodes to change over time, which means effects can be animated. Through the ‘Image’ node artists can also import still images and videos from outside of Blender. This extends its functionality to act more like a layer-based system such as Photoshop.