bypass photoshop

with the release of photoshop cs4 and the surrounding discussion i have been exploring different avenues of post-production.  nothing new here, i’ve loved blender for a long time, but the blender compositor is really growing up quite nicely.  it easily supported my modo 32-but openEXR render, and then i quickly set up nodes for tone-mapping, glare, color adjustments, sharpen and noise… things one would usually do in PS.

what makes this so much better is that because it’s nodes you can update the input image and the process will run anew on that image… so if you forgot to include an object in the render, just render again and save over the file and the nodes will update

what makes me happiest is the decent tone-mapping, although i would prefer a more visual approach it does the job!

paint

physical

two modo renders, both glorified lighting tests…

been spending time learning about lighting, rendering hdri’s, tone-mapping etc

i really wish i had a renderfarm so i could use fryrender or maxwell because unbiased engines are truly beautiful.  i’ve tried to push modo as far as i can because it’s the most practical in terms of freelance because it’s actually affordable and it’s fast enough to use on only one pc.

going to move onto max/v-ray next