Hey Reader,

Zach here,

In our last email, I introduced Daniel Nees, author of the Master Compositing in Blender course, and shared more about his talents as a VFX artist and Compositor.

With the launch coming tomorrow (December 20th), I can’t wait for you to experience it.

So, today I want to give you a more in depth overview of what the course teaches, and what our Beta testers have to say about it.

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What Master Compositing in Blender teaches

At a glance, here is what the course will teach you to:

• Easily and quickly improve the look and realism of your renders
• Combine CGI and real footage
• Add real world actors and assets into 3D environments
• Create effects easily that are hard to achieve in 3D
• Gain a lot more creative control and flexibility over your art and film

All in all, Master Compositing gives you the workflows to improve and help with any 3D scene, image or video footage.

How? Let’s dive in.

First, Master Compositing is a Blender-based course designed to teach workflows that can be applied across various compositing software. While we’ll explore other useful tools, Blender is all you need to complete the course and achieve stunning results.

Part 1

Chapters 1–4

Master Compositing starts by teaching about the wide array of nodes available in Blender’s compositor, and how they can be used to achieve effects such as blur, vignette, color grading, lens distortion, glow, film grain and more.

Once we have a good understanding of how the nodes work, we’ll apply them in a practical example, to assemble and improve a sci-fi hangar scene from the provided 3D renders.

At this point, you’ll be able to apply compositing techniques to your own work, not just in the scenes of this course.

Chapter 5

We’ll be using just a few still images and one stock explosion, to combine them into an epic, large-scale animated shot of a city being invaded by a fleet of spaceships, which could normally take days longer if you used a 3D only approach.

We’ll be doing all the animation from scratch, with effects like camera shake, light wrap and lens flares, and learning to use node groups in a few powerful ways.

The techniques employed in this chapter are great for creating large, animated establishing shots from simple 2D images.

Chapters 6–7

We go into some advanced render passes that are commonly used in compositing, such as light groups, cryptomattes and depth passes.

Allowing us to alter individual lights after the render is complete, create automatic masks of animated 3D objects for color grading, creating an atmospheric haze effect or adding defocus to a scene.

We’ll also go through how to separate scenes into layers, in such a way that we can set different render settings, and even different render engines (like Eevee) for each layer.

Then we put this new knowledge into action by creating another shot, a full 3D animated scene of a sci-fi fighter taking off from its hangar bay.

You’ll learn to use light groups to both adjust and animate the lighting of the scene, masks to grade individual objects and create some interesting glow effects, using stock elements, and building effects such as heat haze and a more dynamic camera shake.

Chapter 8

We’ll cover more advanced render passes for even further control of your 3D scenes. Adjusting lighting, textures, and even materials all in the compositor without having to re-render your scenes.

Chapters 9–10

We’ll spend a whole chapter going through how to track real video footage. First, using simple 2D tracks that follow movement and rotation, that allow us to follow the perspective shift of a surface, and then a full 3D camera tracks, which let us add whole 3D objects to our footage.

We’ll even discuss how you can use a 3D track of real footage to add realistic camera animation to a completely 3D scene.

Then we’ll use all the knowledge we’ve built up so far to create this scene of a damaged fighter landing in a car park at night (car park is how they call it in Australia, deal with it - Daniel is from Australia).

This will involve grading our footage (which was filmed during the day), to look like it was filmed at night, adding our CG objects and elements to the footage, and then using a variety of techniques to integrate CG lighting into the scene to really sell the nighttime effect.

All this will be available at the launch tomorrow.

Post Launch Updates

In a later course update, we’ll have a whole chapter dedicated to keying techniques, commonly known as green or blue screen and masking or rotoscoping, followed by another scene where we put a real actor into a 3D environment.

We’ll also go through the process of building some custom compositing tools such as a more flexible glow, procedural vignette, anamorphic smear and some custom color grading tools.

In summary, through this course, Daniel will teach you the tools and techniques necessary to make massive improvements to your work with very little time and effort.

What do the students think?

We run Beta tests for our courses to make sure they are high quality and deliver on its promise.

Here’s what the beta testers have had to say:

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It feels as though Daniel has opened the door to a whole new “world of Blender.” I am amazed at how many options there are to enhance results after rendering. Alexandra K.

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I wasn't very fond of using the compositor. I was using basic nodes before, but it was like a "do and forget" part of the process. This course totally changed my mind. I discovered that compositing is a fun and very flexible tool that helps you create wonders. If you wish to know how to make your renders have this "wow!" effect, this course is a must, totally recommended! Maciej Strzyga-Wolski

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The lessons in this course are broken down into manageable sections. Your skills are progressively built, and the instructor, Daniel Nees, has a friendly, encouraging voice that makes you want to learn. If you only choose one course this year, make it this one. You won't be disappointed. Tim Seabrook

Thank you for taking the time to read this email, I truly appreciate it. Above all, I hope this overview helps you make a clear and well-informed decision.

It's Daniel's first course here at CG Boost, and we are very excited to launch it tomorrow, December 20th.

~Zach