Cool Compositing Book

Well, my hydrant is supposed to be rendering at the moment, BUT, my laptop crashed and shut down while still rendering the 11th frame of the ground occlusion pass. And there are a total of 162 frames per pass, with a total of 7 passes to render. And it's not that I did not try to render again - I did 5 times and the same thing happened. Well, frustrating no doubt, but I think I'll have to reformat my laptop and render the frames on my desktop. Oh well, it happens.

So I thought that meanwhile, I would share about a book which I borrowed from the library - The Art and Science of Digital Compositing.

This is one of the best books I've read so far - a must for anyone who's interested in compositing. I am just halfway through my third chapter and I'm already learning so much. Not to forget that there real world examples of how certain shots from certain movies were composited. Very cool.

I was exploring the DVD that came with it and I found out that they had actually included a few source files from certain movies. I took the source files from King Kong and did a small composite in Fusion:

The pass breakdown for Kong and the T-Rex wasn't provided - only the beauty pass for each was provided. So I had to make do with that. Nothing great actually, but I got to practice the Ultra-Keyer tool in Fusion to remove the blue screen. Very cool!