Blender Tutorial: The Forgotten Cottage [Digital Matte Painitng]

In this video, we will be creating a Digital Matte Painting called "The Forgotten Cottage". Once we have arranged our workspace we can then load in our footage. If you want to download the same video I used, you can find the download here.

We can then render out a single frame that will be used as a reference. Using your Image Editor of choice, we can load the reference and begin arranging images, shadows, highlights and more. You can find the Images I used here and here.

When we are happy with how everything looks, we can delete the reference image and then export our Matte Image as a PNG.

Then back in Blender we can get o with the good stuff!, The Compositing.

Adding assets to our footage (no matter if that is an image or video), it is not that complicated. We can just use a mix and the job is done. That would be the case if the original video was not moving but it is in fact moving. So we need to add a translate node along with a Track Input Node.

This can be done much easier if you  *Warning - Shameless Self Promoting* have the Darkfall VFX Nodes Add-on enabled. For those of you who don't know, the VFX Nodes Add-on is a free blender Add-on I have been developing and you can download the script here.

If you have the Add-on you can easily add the Patch Node (among others) and speed up your workflow. we will also be using the Gradient Node and the Vignette Node too.

I hope you find this video helpful and as always thanks for reading!.

Blender Python Tutorial: Lists - Create, Append and Remove

 

In this video, we will be taking a look at not only creating a List but also how we can append and remove items from the List. We will also give the user the option to add to the List. 

 If you want to follow along you can download the Starting Template script here. Alternatively you can download the finished result here. 

 Creating a List is simple. We just need a reference name for the List and then we can either enter some items by default or append Items when needed. 

Here is a List with items (strings) already added.

Here is an empty List (which we will be using in the example).

Once we have created a list we can then create Items that can be added to the list. These can be Strings and/or Numbers.

Now we have Items that can be added to our List we can simply append each one. 

To Remove Items from the List.

 

 

If we have more than one Item we want to add to our List we need to use Extend.

 

To Remove all the Items from a List. 

 

If you want more information about Lists, check the Blender Doc here.

Now we know how to create, append and remove items from our List we can create a little example. 

In the Example, we will not only add a number of new Items to our List but also let the user add an Item using a String Property. 

There are many different ways we can utilize Lists and this is just scratching the surface of what we can do with them. In a future Video we will be using Lists for something I think is pretty interesting so be sure to look out for that!.

I hope you find this video helpful and as always thanks for reading!.