I tend to attract a lot of Blender users on my site, so every now and then I’ll post a tutorial or a rant about blender. Everyone else who isn’t a huge nerd or Blender user or both probably won’t care to read any further on this post.

This week, I’m going to talk about Blender’s composite node editor.

It’s awesome! You should never render an image in blender without tweaking it in the node editor. Node based post-processing is superior to post-processing in a regular image manipulation program for a number of reasons: It’s non-linear, non-destructive, and it handles color in 32-bit floating point values.

You can also use it to make an image that looks like a map of the London Underground:

Allow me to explain this madness…

After flattening the character shots onto the softened background (more on that later), I get an image, part of which looks like this:

That’s prior to all the other post-pro. Kind of bland, right?

Right. So then, I blur the image, and overlay it onto the original. This is a popular method known as the “instant sex” effect.

Next (and here’s the clever part), I take the alpha channel, reverse it, blur it, and use it to overlay a yellow tint:

Then I do some some color curves…

And that’s it. No GIMP or Photoshop required.

But wait! The glow effect that I applied in the third step kind of drowned out Proc and Fizzik in the last shot:

So I make a quick garbage matte in the texture window:

And use that to diminish the glow effect.

See how “easy” that was? Next week, I’ll explain how a single corrupted pixel caused this weekend’s comic to be delayed by 24 hours.