Blender  V3.3
of the Blender Compositor

Blender compositor

This project redesigns the internals of Blender's compositor. The project has been executed in 2011 by At Mind. At Mind is a technology company located in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The project has been crowd-funded. This code has been released under GPL2 to be used in Blender.

The goals of the project

the new compositor has 2 goals.

  • Make a faster compositor (speed of calculation)
  • Make the compositor work faster for you (workflow)

Faster compositor

The speedup has been done by making better use of the hardware Blenders is working on. The previous compositor only used a single threaded model to calculate a node. The only exception to this is the Defocus node. Only when it is possible to calculate two full nodes in parallel a second thread was used. Current workstations have 8-16 threads available, and most of the time these are idle.

In the new compositor we want to use as much of threads as possible. Even new OpenCL capable GPU-hardware can be used for calculation.

Work faster

The previous compositor only showed the final image. The compositor could wait a long time before seeing the result of his work. The new compositor will work in a way that it will focus on getting information back to the user. It will prioritize its work to get earlier user feedback.