I’d add easy use of compositor for image editor filters to that list, but the image editor needs to be improved to be a real image editor first. Get proper support for multilayered images and utility layers and such. Overall blender could use more integration between it’s editors.
All in all totally agree with your post.
Another major issue that is a deal breaker for serious composite work is the lack of time related tools. Holding frames, referencing other frames in the tree for various temporal tasks is a must have.
++ Holding Frames — especially in the Loader nodes. Also setting them to loop would be nice
+1 for time related UI improvements. For example there are differences between the way the VSE represents shot start and end and the way the Image/movie node does. If we can’t “send” clips between VSE and Comp, perhaps we could more easily send Metadata like clip start/end, speed, reverse etc.?
I imagine at least a dynamic link between assets so that they play in a synchronised way. So you could have a VSE timeline view below the compositor, so that you could slide and trim the clips as required. You could visualise the active asset (strip) by isolating it in the VSE preview monitor. This is much quicker than cacheing from the Preview node, at least for line up and timing to sound.
Are you guys aware of this re-coding of the compositor project?
“This is an experimental and unofficial Blender branch (https://www.blender.org/). Its main goal is to improve the performance of the compositor. It may tackle some of the objectives described in this task: https://developer.blender.org/T74491 . But probably not in the same way as proposed.”
Experimental builds can be found at Graphicall ex. Win here:
Hi all,
Can you have a look at Compositor Improvement Plan: relative space ?
Need your feedback on this topic.
I am a bit late to the party and I am new here. Plz forgive me if my etiquette is not aligned with the community’s (feedback is much appreciated). I am relying on Blender heavily in my research. It is by far the “BEST” tool ever. The one thing I desperately need in the compositor is having multiple viewer node output to different images. Currently (Blender 2.90) only the active viewer node outputs to the image editor. I use multiple AOVs and wish to access their output from memory or at least from the image editor.
Great community.
Thanks.
I don’t know if this thread is still active, but just in case I wanted to point out one of the main issues I have when rendering from the compositor, which is that the file output node does not output cryptomatte metadata in a useful way (it all gets mushed together into a single channel, and becomes unusable in 3rd party programs such as nuke).
I also wanted to point out to this thread that I opened a while ago about how to make the passes’ naming more flexible and practical (in my view), that I think may be of some use here.
Anyway, I hope the compositor gets some love! It has a huge potential, but unfortunately it lacks a lot of optimizations (and features that are mentioned here) to be as a production-level tool.
This sounds like using a second “Render Layer” node and setting the second one to a another scene. This is possible right now. And of course you can use different render engines, for example to get the EEVEE bloom on top of a Cycles Render:
There are new builds up of the Compositor Up fork which includes many improvements. The latest adds a Camera View node and Auto-Compositing.
Download: https://blender.community/c/graphicall
1325827876306866177_1325827876306866177
wow. A Camera View Node is fantastic news.
whaaaat? 
This are amazing news!
Just bumping this thread to express my hopes to have all these improvements into master.
Any chance?
If this could be reviewed and put to master would be awesome. He has done some great work.
I am interested to have a layer stack compositor same as the other classic programs like Krita or Photoshop.
Just have about 50 layers with their color+mask in a single stack, not creating trees of endless alpha over nodes. Neither a group of alpha over trees (which is slow).
Sorry for shameless plug. I’m playing with that idea for while:
After having to work with the Blender compositor for the last few weeks I’ve written down some thoughts on it. Feel free to ignore, i just had to get it off my chest.
In my opinion the whole compositor of Blender needs to be rethought and build up from scratch:
Mostly because is a historical design, played really well in the context of Blender internal. Now things are exactly the opposite. That would lead to design the compositor in a totally new way.
I remark each one of those points!
And as @anon10078140 says, I’d like to see some composite in the viewport, some cheap but common and useful 2d filters applied directly on what you see in the viewport. For example: RGB curves, some tonemapping, bloom, lens distortion…
About how to implement this, I imagined Nodetrees for cameras, where you find only relevant nodes.
