Compositing the scene

Compositing allows us to add awesome effects to our final render to make it look more believable. We can change the mood of our render, giving it a cold, bluish look or a warm, sunny feeling.

To switch to compositing, you need to make sure that you have already rendered your scene; otherwise, there will be no initial input to work with under the Compositing tab.

At the top of your Blender scene, you’ll find a bunch of tabs. Go to Compositing and check the Use Nodes box.

Figure 13.23 – Switching to the Compositing tab in Blender

To see our render in the background, let’s press Shift + A and search for the Viewer node:

Connect the Render Layers Image slot to the Image slot of the Viewer node. This way, we’ll be able to see the render displayed in the background.

Figure 13.24 – Adding the Viewer node in our compositing setup

Let’s start with the first compositing...