Masking in Blender

by - 2012/06/05 36 Comments Production

This is a first demo of the current status of the masking tools in Blender, that are currently being developed. Since we need it desperately for the work on Mango, we are all very happy to be able to use these tools.

But be aware that the development is still in progress, so you can expect some changes and improvements.
These tools have been merged to the main development version of Blender, so if you want to use them, either build trunk (SVN), or go to graphicall.org and download the latest version there.

Thanks to Sergey Sharybin, Pete Larabell and Campbell Barton for their work!

  1. JiBZ says:

    perfect!
    incredible work!
    you guys FTW!!!

  2. D says:

    That is wonderfulsome! :D

  3. Tuub says:

    Grrrreat! Awesome and all those incredible words for this masking tool!

  4. marcoG_ITA says:

    This is serious work guys

  5. Wolter says:

    Wow great work! This already looks fully functional (feature wise)!

    What is the reason the handles are perpendicular to the curve instead of tangential, like the handles in the Graph Editor or the Bezier curves?

  6. Andy says:

    Keep up the great work guys, this is a very important feature!

  7. Manollo says:

    Thanks devs and sebastian. great feature… again !

  8. Sam Schad says:

    This is the bomb. I like the rotobezier tool and all- but this makes so much more sense. Just awesome.

  9. 3pointedit says:

    To be clear can I attach different trackers to different mask vertices? Or just one tracker to each mask object?

    • sebastian says:

      you can parent as many markers as you want.
      something that we thought about is “smooth parent”, in case you want to parent 2 parts of a mask to 2 markers with a nice falloff :)

      • Hi Sebastian!

        It would be great if when all this Mango madness ends (and you get a deserved holidays), you’d release a follow up to “Track, Match Blend!” covering more advanced tracking (planar…) masking and other VFX related fun

        TMB is the best learning I’ve ever purchased!

  10. chrisl says:

    AHH GUYS!! That’s terrific work, I’m criyng in joy having just seen your work and what Blender is going to become, speechless… truly… :)

    thank you so much Sergey, Pete and Campbell !! :D

  11. francoisgfx says:

    At laaassstt :) Yeaaahhh !

    I know this is a very early stage anyway, but I’m still wondering about the decision of using clip editor for that though. Since masking is much more than just garbage masking footage for roto-prep or tracking.
    You will probably use it at any point in your composition. and not necessarly with a footage/movieclip as input.
    Which wouldn’t make much sence to bring back some result of your comp to clip editor, draw shape on that, to then go back to compositor. Especially when you actually want to draw the shape on the overall result of you comp.
    Also having the entire data of the shape (vertices position, anchor points, scale, …) can be very needed in different place to be able to link data onto it.
    I would have thought that a common viewer to different space (3d, compo, vse,…) as the image editor would have been a better solution. But there is probably something I’m missing though :p

    Anyway, I can’t wait to see what is coming next.

    cheers

    F.

  12. Blendiac says:

    Phwoar! Sexiness indeed, especially being able to vary feathering by node (yes, I know it’s industry standard, but somehow I expected we’d get this in an update, not in the initial version).

    Now if we can get a way that you can adjust the nodes/feathering, and see the effect of the mask in the same UI somewhere, it’ll be perfect.

    Awesome work guys. Just awesome.

  13. mejhai says:

    de verdad impresionante me saco el sombrero

  14. theLuthier says:

    F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C work gentlemen. You’re all wizards.

  15. Andrius.B says:

    Amazing work guys!!!
    I have been waiting for this for quite some time now!
    A very big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this.

  16. Bao2 says:

    Thanks for the video. Really useful to have a quick grasp of the new tool and then going to the wiki for the small details:
    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Nazg-gul/MaskEditor

  17. j-joey says:

    it would be great if we can pin two tracks to mask to drive position, scale and rotation

  18. Andy says:

    What’s “Bokeh Image” under the add>input menu?

    • 3pointedit says:

      Bokeh Image is the shape of the out of focus background. The shape the iris would make if you were shooting with a real lens, they have blades to make a, not quite, circle as they close.

  19. sozap says:

    Great guys ! it was worth waiting it’s really clean ! these seems far better than masking in after effect. And do I see a dot node like in nuke at 9mn30 !!! it’s a little but a great addition, I wanted that for sooo long ! thank you !!

  20. Tycho says:

    I use this and whaa :) so good
    What can be added (I don’t know weather it’s hard or not) is an option that make the mask fit the nearest edge (there is already an edge detection in blender with sobel algorithm isnt it). At term it can lead to a mask that track the mooving edge. And Mocha disapear ! Fiou

  21. luckyxxl says:

    would it make sense to be able to add/delete mask-points during the animation? when i did some masking (orthographic camera + curves) it would have been a nice feature.

  22. Stuart says:

    As everyone else has said, great work guys! This is absolutely a must-have tool. It looks like you’ve really thought about providing a solid feature set up front. Can’t wait to try it (and all the other changes from mango) soon!

  23. khader says:

    that was the best news In the whole week !!!

    love you guys

    keep it up

    blender is gonna kill the commercials lol

  24. 3pointedit says:

    Love it. So much it’s lots of fun having a play with Masks.

    I notice that Keyframes aren’t available in F-curve editor. So I can’t delete a keyed shape that I accidentaly defined earlier. Also The keyframe is tied to global time not the movie clip, so if you change the Movie clip start frame (new AWESOME feature) the mask keyframe doesn’t slide with it.

    For some reason I cannot define the feather in an already created keyed mask shape either.

  25. maghoxfr says:

    Magic, pure magic. This is the best news for me. Incredible, I’m truly happy about this being implemented. THANK YOU ALL!!!

  26. Stuart says:

    Hey guys, I’m using the latest Blender and trying out the masking and it’s great! But I did find an issue with aspect ratio mismatches between movie source and current blend file settings. Want to check it out and see if I’m doing it wrong? :)

    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?260090-Blender-2.63.13-r48710-mask-aspect-ratio-issues