Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Understanding Nodes

When you take a simple render (simple means a raw render, with no compositing involved), your scene is the input and the output will be the same as the input. When you enable the use of nodes, the input and the output are connected, but you can modify the final result by adding nodes in between that will apply effects and changes to the input before it reaches the output. The modifications can be as simple as color corrections or as complex as adding visual effects or mixing several different renders into a single render.

A node structure is often called a node tree, as its connections resemble branches that ultimately connect to form a single output—the tree’s trunk. In Figure 14.2, you can see a basic scheme of how a node ...