So you’ve spent months trying to wrap your head around digital color spaces and have finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, but mostly screaming, into an ACES-compliant workflow. Eventually, you think you’ve finally got it, and all the colors just *look the same* regardless of which bit of software you’re using or which stage of the pipeline you’re at. Yay!
ACES Workflow: Redshift to Resolve
In 2021, around version 3.point.something, Redshift changed its default color space from what it called “scene-linear Rec.709-sRGB” to ACEScg. If you’re using DaVinci Resolve to muss with your newly ACES-compliant Redshift EXRs, then you need to change your color settings.
Color Banding: Bit Depth & Chroma Sampling
TL;DR If you’re seeing color banding in your exported video, it’s almost certainly because you’re using an encoding profile that specifies a color depth of 8 bits. Use a codec, such as H.265 / HVEC, DNxHR or ProRes, that supports 10 bit color and configure it to use a 10 bit encoding profile.
Fixing UI Font Size in DaVinci Resolve
Out of the box, Davinci Resolve’s UI font and icons are so small that they are practically unreadble on small, hi res (aka high DPI) monitors. Even 1440×2560 on a 27″ screen (e.g. EIZO ColorEdge CG2730) is horrible.
Houdini Volume Gradients are Like Surface Normals
I’d seen volume gradients used in a few places and not really understood them. Houdini help says: “the gradient is a vector pointing in the direction of increasing volume values.” Hmm. Nothing if not laconic.
Houdini Frozen Geometry Tutorial
Really excellent tutorial — very clear, well-paced, and with solid workflow — by Armin Lofti showing how to abuse the pyro source spread node (introduced in Houdini 18) as a quick and dirty way to drive noised infections and growth patterns, used here to grow a sheath of ice around a freezing object.
What is Digital Color?
The discourse around digital color is complex and confusing. If you care about color at all and you work in digital, you should probably spend at least a whole day of your life on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Digital Colour, which gives several messianic fucks about making this difficult stuff clearer.
Melting Objects by Varying Viscosity in Houdini FLIP
Converting a mesh into a highly viscous FLIP fluid in Houdini, then selectively lowering the viscosity of certain areas by raising their temperature, is a fairly simple way to simulate a melting object, with reasonable art-directability by means of noising and animating an invisible heat source.