Honest review of this lecture: it was the weakest one in the whole course. And coming from someone who actually enjoys compositing, that stung a little.
What They Covered
The main thing Patata School showed in this session was how to add a hand-drawn effect to the final render using a Displace node in the compositor. The idea is to introduce a subtle wobble to the image that makes it feel more like a drawn animation rather than a clean 3D render. In principle, interesting. In practice, it didn’t work for me because the tutorial was recorded on an older version of Blender and the node setup behaved differently in my version. I had to figure out a workaround myself, and even after getting it to work I wasn’t particularly happy with the direction they were going aesthetically anyway, so I altered it to something that felt more like my own style.
Beyond that, the session covered adding depth of field, motion blur, and a small camera movement, which I mostly improvised in the moment rather than following any specific instruction. How to actually render the project wasn’t explained in any meaningful detail either, but I’d picked up enough across the previous sessions to get through that on my own without too much trouble.
There was also something about removing the weird edges that were showing up in my shot, which I genuinely didn’t follow. I’m going to fix those in DaVinci Resolve in post instead, which honestly feels like the more sensible place to handle that kind of cleanup anyway.
General Feeling About This One
This lecture left me with very little to write about, which is itself kind of telling. The tips were basic, the main effect was a niche visual style I’m unlikely to use again, and the version gap between the tutorial and my Blender setup caused more friction than it should have. For a compositing lecture aimed at someone who wanted to add a proper finishing layer to their shot, it felt thin.
Not every session can be a revelation though, and the previous ones more than made up for it. The render is essentially done and I’m reasonably happy with how the whole thing looks.
The next post will be the last one: a full reflection on the process, how far I actually got versus where I hoped to be, and what I’d do differently if I started over.
See ya!
