Blender Cryptomatte – Why is it important?

In the following video I describe a brief history of troubles that we, as 3d compositors, ran into whenever working with old layer passes system, clown passes, masks and unpremult alpha channels.

For those of you who don´t know what horrible fate compositors faced before deadlines, let’s check out why Cryptomatte was a much needed life saver in a Blender-based studio pipeline. Next week I´ll be talking about how you can take more advantage of this amazing function from other workflows as well..

Enjoy and share!

Transcript:

This video training will focus on the Blender 2.8 Compositor and some of the techniques used professionally to enhance the quality of the render images.

We´ll briefly go through one of the key nodes in this moment called Cryptomatte, and how it will help us to accomplish a basic color correction onto the blasted rock.

But first, let’s review common pitfalls for a compositor. One thing a compositor should always look out for are EDGES. They are 1 or 2 pixel halo oultines that break the illusion of seamless integration. Noise severely damages the composite layers and let’s keep in mind alpha transparency means you gotta have pixel perfect cutouts of your passes, masks or mattes. This is known as premult factor. It´s a headache to have to fix alpha transparency first and integrate it with other scene element renders or passes specially on tight deadlines and human error renders.