When we last checked up on my college work , I'd submitted my final project for a graphic design class, a poster on the only-more-relevant issue of police brutality. With that said, a lot of my later work hasn't really been discussed here, and while some of that's because my junior year focused more on fine art than digital art, I still have a number of digital-related classes I haven't gotten to, among them a program I've only touched on once before on the blog! I found myself going back to the layout-focused InDesign . One of the more fun tools here was the Feather Gradient, which enables one to seamlessly overlay two images (one can technically do the same thing with Photoshop by copy/pasting a black-and-white gradient as a mask for one layer, but the Feather Gradient was definitely a more convenient alternative).  For my first project, I was required to make a flier for a dance party of our choice; while my knowledge of InDesign was certainly put to the tes...

So a little while back , I tried out Blender's Node Editor for the first time, and I realized I was able to composite footage of myself onto an image of the same shot's background (which, as it turns out, would be the same base technique at the heart of the superhuman leaping/falling distances in Clash of the Jedi and ABYDOS ). I decided to try it out using the Keying node, and while it looked pretty cool, it wasn't quite what I had in mind… So, over half a decade later (during my hiatus from the blog in 2019, in fact), I realized I could probably do a better job by now, so I decided to redo the same test. No problem: just fire up After Effects, drop Keylight onto the footage and throw on an adjustment layer to color correct the remaining yellow-green tint… but then I realized an issue. I didn't even have After Effects in 2013; of course I'd be able to do a better job in a more compositing-oriented program! Instead, I decided to go back to Blender. First o...