For those who don’t know the tool: DaVinci Resolve combines editing, Fusion, colour grading and Fairlight audio post. Version 21 also adds still-image processing.

Final, mostly familiar

Resolve 21, Fusion, Fairlight Live, and many, many boxes!

Blackmagic Design has released DaVinci Resolve 21 for Windows, macOS and Linux. The release converts the features developed through four public betas into the final 21.0 branch. Most headline additions arrived in the first beta. These include the Photo page, AI IntelliSearch, Speech Generator, CineFocus, MultiMaster trim passes, expanded keyframing, Fairlight folders and more than 70 Krokodove tools for Fusion. The initial feature set appeared in our NAB overview and our closer look at the Photo page.

What the betas added

Public Beta 2 added tethered capture for supported Canon and Sony cameras, background rendering, proxy generation, Fusion remote monitoring and wider access to Studio AI tools. Public Beta 4 concentrated on repair work. It corrected Canon RAW highlights, improved still-image FX controls, exposed Fusion motion paths in the keyframe editor and refined CineFocus output. The final build therefore brings fewer surprises than its version number suggests. That is fine. Production software benefits more from predictable behaviour than another feature attempting to write the porject brief.

The iPad catches up

The clearest final-release addition is DaVinci Resolve for iPad, which now reaches version 21. The tablet edition gains the Photo page with albums, ratings, tags, RAW processing, cloud synchronisation and Resolve’s Color Grading controls. It also receives selected AI tools, expanded keyframing, OGraf and Lottie support, MultiMaster trims and Apple ProRAW decoding. Its feature set still depends on the iPad model and does not match every desktop function. It does, however, move considerably beyond the original Cut and Color configuration.

Pricing and migration

Blackmagic Design turns DaVinci Resolve 21 into a photo app

DaVinci Resolve 21 remains free. DaVinci Resolve Studio costs $295. Projects opened in version 21 cannot return to Resolve 20.3.2. Back up project libraries and individual projects before migration, particularly when shared databases, plug-ins or active deliveries enter the colour pipeline. New tools and innovations should always be tested with representative media and delivery settings before use in production. A missing beta label is useful. It is not quality control.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew

The post DaVinci Resolve 21 Leaves Beta first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Bend It targets a familiar pain: you want bend, taper, twist, or shear, but you do not want to build a whole 3D scene just to get there. The macro applies those deformation modes to a 2D source, using a mesh-based approach and controls that aim to feel closer to a 3D deformer than a plain 2D warp.

The macro includes bend, taper, twist, and shear modes, and it can process horizontal and vertical deformation in sequence with a user-defined order. It also adds transform controls for both the mesh and the texture, so you can animate deformation and placement without rebuilding the setup.

If you live in Compositing and you keep re-inventing the same rig every month, this sits right in the spot where you normally lose an afternoon.

Mesh density you can animate, not babysit

Bend It exposes mesh subdivision controls that scale with the deformation amount. A minimum subdivision level applies when deformation sits at zero, and the macro ramps toward a maximum as horizontal or vertical deformation approaches its extremes.

The macro also offers a render mode that can show mesh, texture, or both, which helps when you need to diagnose jagged edges or wobble in the texture mapping. The mesh subdivision note comes with a practical warning: shear does not benefit much from higher polygon counts unless you specifically want the wireframe look. About one third into setup tinkering, you will probably start calling this a wrokflow improvement. That is allowed. Just do not say it near a supervisor.

Factors, edges, and a sneaky tiling trick

Bend It includes factor controls that can scale back transformations made in the main controls. Sliding factors down can effectively reset deformation and transforms, which makes for quick animation beats and quick sanity checks. The macro also separates factor locking across mesh and texture if you want independent control.

There is also a practical trick for partial tiling: reduce texture scale and increase mesh scale by the same amount to get an area with repeated texture detail. Edge controls become relevant in that case, because they only make sense when texture scale drops below 1.0. This macro leans into the idea that you should be able to steer both the deformation and the sampling behavior without building a separate rig. If you like compact rigs, you will still need self-control. The settings count is not small.

Lighting and material options, if you insist

Bend It can run with optional direct and ambient lighting, plus basic bump and reflection support. It also includes controls to drive bump, reflection, and specular behavior using a single map, with toggles for inverting individual channels. When you only render the mesh, a diffuse color can be used to set mesh color without enabling lighting.

There is also a direct light widget meant to help visualize light direction. The macro recommends turning it off before final rendering, unless you enjoy explaining UI overlays in finals. The macro uses an orthographic camera. That keeps the tool aligned with 2D results, but it also means depth of field does not function in this setup.

Requirements, quirks, and the stuff that bites at 2 am

Bend It requires Fusion 19.1+, because it uses the Switch node. The Switch tool in DaVinci Resolve 19.1 supports multiple inputs, with a slider that adds up to nine and a Number of Inputs field that can be typed higher.

The macro notes a few known issues and workarounds. The viewer may occasionally show a black frame, but playback or touching settings tends to refresh it, and renders are not described as affected. Motion blur reportedly refused to work on frame zero in one setup, tied to how camera scale checks source ratio on that first frame. A workaround used a Time Speed node with a negative one-frame delay, and a later version changes that approach.

There is also a hard warning: adding an expression to the AA Filter Type setting on a Renderer3D node caused Fusion to crash and could corrupt the comp file. If you take one lesson from this: do not stress-test your production file with experimental expressions five minutes before delivery.

https://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?p=57053

The post Fridays for Fusion: Bend It first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Manuel Kotulla.

In this video, we are taking a look at the ongoing effort of the Otoy team to modernise the Cinema 4D Plugin with “quality of life” improvement, as well as newly added features such as the “Material Link”. If you are an Octane C4D user, don’t miss out on this video. I bet you find one or more useful things in there!

CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro
00:32 Tut Overview
01:24 C4D Octane Material Link
03:03 C4D Octane UI Improvements
03:19 C4D Octane Scene / Plugin Settings
03:48 C4D Octane Imager UI
04:12 C4D Octane Rest Position Tag Improvements
04:18 C4D Octane Null Material Improvements
04:40 C4D Octane Nodes Selection Improvements
04:49 C4D Octane Round Edge / Mat Layer ON
05:18 C4D Octane Live Viewer Color Rollout
05:36 C4D Octane Live Viewer Scaling
05:51 C4D Octane Improved Node Previews
06:11 C4D Octane Node Color4 options
06:32 C4D Octane Attribute Node String
07:19 C4D Octane Clamp Edge Displacement
07:47 C4D Octane C4D OCIO support!
09:41 Conclusion
10:23 Patreon Thanks

Download the Tut Scene by becoming a Patreon member. No matter which tier!

VIDEO RELATED LINKS:
Maxon’s Official Website: https://www.maxon.net/
Octane C4D Otoy Official Website: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewfor…

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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a VFX artist spends too much time obsessing over pixels and lighting, well, welcome to my world! You can find all my latest experiments, tutorials, and general nerdy shenanigans here:

Website: silverwing-vfx.de
Patreon: patreon.com/SilverwingVFX (Get scenefiles for all of my tutorial scenes also while supporting me)
Instagram: instagram.com/silverwingvfx (Finished 3D projects and engagement with the community)
YouTube: youtube.com/@SilverwingVFX (Updates and news about my work and what I am up to)

And if you’re into retro gaming and deep-dive nostalgia, check out the big article I wrote for this magazine: my love letter to the legendary Game Boy. Because nothing says “true love” like an 8-bit screen and a battery life that could outlast modern smartphones.

The post C4D Octane: 1.9.x Update Features Video first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Raphael Rau.

For those who don’t know the tool: True Sky is a sky, atmosphere, and HDRI tool inside Blender for Cycles only. It targets lighting and environment lookdev, and it sits alongside tools like True Terrain 5 for building full outdoor shots.

A sky rig that insists on real scale

True Sky by True VFX is an Earth atmosphere you can fly through, built around planet-scale scattering so a single scene can move from ground level to lunar orbit. It brings a 1-to-1 Earth radius scale and a 100 km atmospheric depth (otherwise known as the Karman Line). True Sky 3 exposes Rayleigh, Mie, and ozone layers with real-world coefficients. Or at least so it claims.

But there is more: Celestial objects, including the sun, moon, all nine planets, asteroid belts, and custom emitters with true orbital positions and scalable sizes. It also has aurora and rings support. If you work in the Blender ecosystem, the practical thing is consistency: the same sky rig aims to cover horizon shots, timelapses, and space fly-bys without swapping HDRIs or rebuilding a world shader per shot. Just remember that new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, especially when volumes sit at the center of your lighting, and te tool is all around your scene.

Cycles only, Blender 5.1 only, and here is why

The listing states it is compatible with Cycles only and does not support Eevee. It also has Blender Version 5.1 as the minimums, since Blender 5.1 changed its underlying Python version, which required rebuilding the Python modules the add-on needs and made it not backward compatible. You can access older files that worked in Blender 4.5, but those may miss some optimizations.

Exposure, HDRIs, and the classic pure white sky moment

By the way, a common first-run surprise is a pure white sky. The tool uses real world values, which can overblow images by default, and suggests adjusting exposure. Enable Exposure in the TrueSKY panel path Misc, Effects, Exposure, then lower exposure around minus 4.0 and setting opacity to 1.0.

The same FAQ notes a compositor gotcha: if compositing applies only to camera views, the background can look correct in camera but blow out in the viewport. It recommends switching Compositing Mode from Camera to Always.

Performance controls that behave like a shot budget

The dedicated docs describe a Performance panel built to balance quality and speed for volumetrics, clouds, and heavy effects. It splits into Presets, Volumes, and Extras. Presets provide a Volume Preset baseline, plus Steps Mode with Fast Steps for lookdev and Accurate Steps for flying through volumes or horizon-heavy shots. It also has a Quality Mode where Fast increases effective step size and Accurate reduces step size, plus a Fast Viewport toggle that doubles viewport step size for quicker previews. The docs suggest a simple strategy: Fast Steps plus Fast Quality for blocking, then switch to Accurate for finals. Not Revolutionary, but appreciated. Why not call it Proxy?

Volumes exposes per-layer controls, including an Atmosphere Quality slider and per-layer Cloud Quality sliders, plus an Altitude Weighting toggle that lets higher cloud layers use slightly lower quality for speed. The docs recommend raising only the hero cloud layer rather than cranking everything globally.

Extras include viewport and render helpers like viewport and camera render regions, pixel size for faster viewport renders on high-resolution screens, and tile size for CPU-friendly final renders. If you want the shortest possible summary: True-VFX gives you a place to decide what gets quality, what gets speed, and what gets left alone until the director stops moving the camera. And that is almost always the same place you wanted to put it in the first version, but ….

Pricing and licensing

True Sky 3 is early access and sets an early access price at 40 USD, 50 USD release price. Also, there is a separate Lifetime Updates option at 250USD. Licensing is GPL, and the tool can be maintained or customised by the user even after official support ends. Updates are included for the 3.x series, and a planned 15 USD upgrade fee for a future 4.0. A portion of each product sale is donated to the Blender Foundation (about 5 per cent), and 13,000 USD have already been donated by the community supporting the product line.

https://superhivemarket.com/products/true-sky?ref=586
https://truesky-documentation.pages.dev/
https://www.true-vfx.xyz/

The post True Sky 3 brings planet-scale skies to Blender first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Beeble is a AI based VFX toolset built around video to video processing, including SwitchX for background replacement, object inpainting, and relighting, plus Switch Light for generating compositing passes such as normals, albedo, roughness, specular, metalness, depth, and alpha.

The short version: yes, you can use it in Nuke

The Nuke Plugin enables a workflow that stays inside Nuke: load a pass set, connect it to a controller, then drive lighting with dedicated nodes. It targets relighting work where you want quick iterations without building a full CG relight setup from scratch, but still want predictable inputs and knobs you can animate. You need Nuke 14.1v2 or newer. The plugin is working on Windows and macOS. If your show sits on Linux, that missing test line matters.

Install: one folder, one line, one restart

Installation is classic Nuke: unzip the plugin folder, move the Beeble folder into your .nuke directory, then add a single plugin path line to init.py. On macOS, the target path is ~/.nuke/Beeble/. On Windows, it is C:\Users.nuke\Beeble. After restart, the plugin appears on the toolbar as a new menu.

If you want the lowest-drama rollout on a facility machine, treat it like any other Nuke plguin deployment: version the folder, keep init.py changes minimal, and test on a clean user profile before you touch shared configs.

What the plugin actually wants: a very specific PBR stream

The plugin’s key constraint is the PBR multi layer format. It expects a single image stream containing multiple Nuke layers named Source, Normal, Basecolor, Roughness, Specular, and Metallic. The node reference calls this “PBR multi layer stream” the core input, and the controller and light nodes all build on it.

There are three supported ways to feed it: EXR sequences, PNG sequences, or MP4 videos. EXR needs each frame to carry multiple passes packed into layers in a single EXR file per frame, such as Frame_000001.exr. PNG and MP4 need one pass per sequence or video, arranged so the loader can map names to the expected pass inputs.

This is also where the tool draws a hard line between convenience and correctness: if your pass naming or folder layout drifts, import stops being one click.

Load PBR Passes: the most important button is the first one

The Quick Start flow begins in the Nuke toolbar: Beeble, then Load PBR Passes. You point it at an unzipped folder of VFX passes. For PNG, the folder must contain subfolders for each pass, and each subfolder holds a PNG sequence like Normal/Normal_000001.png. For MP4, the folder must include one video per pass named .mp4 such as Normal.mp4.

When you load PNG or MP4, the plugin automatically creates a PBRPacker node to pack the six inputs into a single multi layer stream. For EXR sequences, the PBRPacker is not needed because the passes are already packed into layers. If you ever need to build the stream by hand, the helper menu exposes PBR Packer, and it takes exactly six inputs in this order: Source, Normal, Basecolor, Roughness, Specular, Metallic.

PBR Controller: fix the material before you blame the light

After import, the plugin creates a PBRController node. It exists for one reason: adjust pass intensities and blending before lighting.

Source Blend ranges from 0 to 1 and blends between BaseColor at 0 and Source at 1. Roughness Exposure, Specular Exposure, and Metallic Exposure each run from minus 2 to 2 and adjust intensity in stops. This is the difference between a light that looks wrong and a material that was weighted wrong.

If you plan to publish a facility preset, this is the node to standardize. It is also the node to keyframe if you need a shot that shifts from dry to wet, but still stays within the same pass set.

Lights: three nodes, clear ranges, and a Merge plus

Lighting lives under Beeble, then Lights. The basic rule stays consistent: connect the PBRController output to the light input, tweak properties, then stack more lights with a Merge set to plus. That Merge plus step is explicitly called out for multi light setups.

Directional Light exposes a horizontal rotation from 0 to 360 degrees and a vertical rotation from minus 90 to 90 degrees, plus light color and an intensity multiplier that starts at 0 and defaults to 1.0.

Point Light exposes XY position in pixels, Z depth from minus 5 to 5, light color, intensity starting at 0 with default 1.0, decay starting at 0 with default 2.0 described as inverse square, and maxDistance starting at 0 where 0 means infinite reach.

Environment Light applies image based lighting using an HDRI and takes two inputs: the PBR multi layer stream plus the HDRI. The Quick Start notes you load the HDRI file and connect it to the light input. The node reference describes HDRI as the second input, and the environment light output is RGBA like the other light nodes.

Limits and gotchas you should not ignore

The documentation states the prerequisites clearly: Nuke 14.1v2 or newer, tested on Windows and macOS. It also defines the pass set rigidly as six layers in one packed stream. If your pipeline produces additional passes like depth or alpha, the Nuke Plugin page does not list them as inputs for the PBR stream.

Use it where you can afford to iterate and where the pass set stays stable across the shot. Lock your ingest, standardize your pass naming, then let artists work with Directional, Point, and HDRI lights like they would in any comp, with the added bonus that they can animate light behavior using regular Nuke tools. And yes, test it before you commit. New tools are great at demos and even better at breaking when a client sends a new plate at 2am.

https://docs.beeble.ai/integration/nuke-plugin
https://docs.beeble.ai/tutorial/nuke-tutorial

Suggested tags:

The post Beeble Nuke plugin: relight with passes first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

What Flow Looper actually does

Flow Looper aims at a very specific pain point: making a still image feel alive without turning it into a full animation project. The core idea centers on drawing a corridor with two splines, then pushing pixels down that corridor and looping the motion with a cross-fade.

That puts it in the same general family as classic flow mapping workflows, but packaged as a Fuse that lives where a lot of Resolve artists already spend their time: the Fusion page. If you ever built a “moving texture down a path” rig in node compositing, you already know the appeal. The win is not that the math exists. The win is that you can hand this to an editor who occasionally opens Fusion, and they might still come back with something usable.

Corridor animation, not a full 2D puppet show

Flow Looper focuses on motion constrained to a defined corridor. You draw the corridor, then the tool handles the continuous movement and looping behavior. The creator describes using several Flow Loopers on a single image to animate different regions. Oh, well.

That corridor constraint matters. It gives you a clear place to cheat motion into a still without needing to invent a full deformation rig. Think steam, fire, drifting energy, or anything that reads as “directional movement” once it repeats cleanly.

The approach also means you can stack multiple instances for layered motion: one corridor for flames, another for smoke, another for embers, each with its own behavior. That layering idea shows up directly in the shared example of a dragon breathing fire, animated by combining multiple instances. At some point, someone will try to animate a face with it. That is fine. That is also how plug-in comment sections become performance art.

Controls: speed shaping, noise, and edges

The feature set goes beyond “make pixels move” and into “make pixels move in a way that does not look like a conveyor belt.” Flow Looper includes start and end flow length controls intended to create acceleration-like behavior, or to keep one end static while the other moves. In practice, that kind of control usually helps sell motion that ramps in, ramps out, or stays anchored so the loop does not scream “tile.”

There is also a turbulence control that varies direction per pixel using noise so the motion does not stay perfectly linear along the corridor.That is the difference between “demo” and “could pass in a shot.” Even small directional variation can break the mechanical look. Edge fading controls aim to blend the flowing region on top of the image more naturally.

The Gumroad listing for Flow Looper shows a price of $12, Which is well worth it, if ou ever had to do something like this, and didn’t have the time for it.

Where this sits in real world Resolve workflows

If you live in editorial and only step into Fusion when the timeline needs “a little something,” Flow Looper looks designed to be that little something, but repeatable and controllable. If you live in Fusion, the tool still has a place, because corridor-constrained motion loops show up constantly in motion graphics and stylized comps. It is also a relatively friendly concept to hand off. “Here is the corridor, here is the direction, here is the loop” is a better brief than “make this still feel alive.”

Tangenten Puppet Pin brings mesh warping to Resolve

For artists browsing the Tangenten tag archive, this is the second clear theme: Fuse tools that try to make Fusion friendlier without pretending nodes do not exist. Finally, check performance. Fusion can handle a lot, but it can also punish you for stacking clever tools on top of each other. Multiply a heavy operation by six instances and your interactive session becomes a slideshow. New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally on a clone of the job, not the only copy of the job.

https://tangenten.gumroad.com/l/FlowLooper

The post Fridays for Fusion: Flow Looper animates stills in Resolve first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Manuel Kotulla.

Silhouette 2026 lands with fewer steps between “I need a clean matte” and “shot approved”, without taking the steering wheel away from artists. The release updates multiple ML-driven matting tools that can detect, segment, propagate, and refine, while still keeping the workflow artist-controlled.

The additions cluster around three pain points that never die in production: edge stability over time, tracking that survives real-world footage, and pipeline plumbing that does not explode when you scale beyond a single workstation. Silhouette 2026 touches all three, and it does it in a very node-graph way: new models, new nodes, and more data moving through the graph instead of getting stranded in side files.

AI matting that thinks in objects, not in one mask at a time

The AI toolset gets updates across five ML nodes, with a focus on scalable multi-object workflows. Face ML gets a new model plus new Nose and Neck matte options, a full-face matte option, and deeper integration with ML masking and compositing workflows. Depth Map ML gets a new model aimed at more detail and improved temporal consistency.

Mask ML adds multi-object workflow features, including object list management, foreground and background refinement tools, and per-object Cryptomatte data. Matte Assist ML adds intermediate frame caching, improved propagation performance across long shots, and multi-object Cryptomatte output. Matte Refine ML adds a new Video Matting model for improved temporal consistency along edges, and it preserves Cryptomatte data after refinement.

Be wary: running many ML masking nodes can load multiple custom models onto the GPU and fill VRAM quickly, so the multi-object approach inside a single Mask ML node matters for both speed and sanity.

If you live in the land of shallow depth of field, it is simple: keep your IDs, then soften your edges with the model that holds up over time. The Video Matting model option in Matte Refine ML is a temporal-consistency favourite in the training material.

Head Track ML and the 3D Scene node get real

Silhouette’s 3D Scene node now pushes further into 3D-aware shot work. It is powered by SynthEyes technology, and Silhouette 2026 adds a new workflow centrepiece: Head Track ML.

Head Track ML uses ML to automatically build and track a full 3D head mesh, preserving facial motion and expressions for face-aware effects. The ML model loads onto the user’s graphics card, detects the head, and then Silhouette creates and tracks an aligned and scaled 3D head mesh.

From there, the new Unwrap and Rewrap nodes connect 3D to 2D UV space for roto, paint, and beauty work, and a Render Depth node can generate depth maps from Head Track ML meshes for beauty work or downstream VFX pipelines.

The training walk-through frames the workflow as a practical alternative to the classic “stabilize a patch, paint, reapply motion, repeat until retirement” approach. The point is to unwrap the tracked head into a stable 2D space, do the detail work, then rewrap it back onto the moving performance. It even comes with a candy-wrapper analogy, because every 3D workflow deserves at least one metaphor before it hits the studio floor.

There’s limits: For example, Head Track ML does not detect relative distance between multiple heads, and suggests using an “All render” option in the Render Depth node if a depth map for all heads is still needed.

On the camera side, Refine Solve is designed to let artists improve a camera solve without reprocessing the entire solve. It supports fixing bad frames and smoothing problem areas by deleting erratic or unnecessary 3D features, aiming for more stable solves and faster cleanups.

Tracking upgrades that target the annoying bits of reality

Silhouette 2026 gives love to two tracking tasks that tend to chew time: point tracks that fall apart when anything gets in the way, and repetitive object tracks for faces and license plates.

Point Track ML updates the long-running point tracker workflow with ML assistance aimed at motion blur, occlusions, objects going off-screen, and changing reference patterns. It includes three accuracy settings and Viewer Stabilisation to validate and lock the track. This is not a guaranteed fix, but it increases the chance of success in those failure cases that always show up right before delivery.

Object Tracker detects and creates layers for object classes, including faces and license plates, to reduce setup time, and tracker types support occlusion matte input. In the tutorial flow, it can automatically generate new layers and shapes when new faces enter a shot during a forward track.

This feature that works best when you treat it like a fast first pass – the result may not be 100 per cent perfect, but perfect for fast turnaround work. You don’t get “final shapes”, but points where you can attach additional Tracking data, and modify what needs to be cleaned.

Paint tools that aim for fewer clicks and fewer regrets

Silhouette’s paint system gets new tools and workflow changes aimed at cleanup and beauty work. A new Healing Brush supports cleanup and retouching with expanded colour sampling from any input. Brush controls add blend modes and pressure-sensitive sizes. Blur, Clone, and Drag brushes get more natural and flexible behaviour. Clone workflow updates add continuous mode and auto-grade locking. Resize Paint introduces a resolution-independent workflow that allows working in a lower-resolution session, then rebuilding strokes accurately on higher-resolution media.

Resize Paint is a way to work quickly at low resolution and later rebuild exact stroke replicas at high resolution, which is basically a polite way of saying your workstation fans can stop auditioning for a jet engine while you block in cleanup.

Cryptomatte, data ports, and fewer matte files to babysit

Silhouette 2026 deepens Cryptomatte-centric workflows, and the important bit is that it treats mattes as data that should travel with the graph, not as files that should multiply in folders.

Pipeline changes include passing filtered Cryptomatte data as alpha through nodes via an Matte input, enabling objects and layers to act as matte sources. A new Cryptomatte Mixer node can combine multiple Cryptomatte streams into a single output. ML and AI tools support multi-object outputs with improved viewer-based selection tools to speed up scene isolation and matte management.

Beware the workflow trap: do not build one Mask ML and one Matte Assist ML node per object, because each node loads its own model to the GPU and VRAM fills fast. Instead, multiple objects can live inside a single Mask ML node, and Cryptomatte over the data port can move reference data to Matte Assist ML even when reference keyframes are scattered along the timeline.

For OFX plugin users, there is a limitation: Cryptomatte data cannot simply be routed to an output node and expected to appear directly in the host application, due to how OFX plugins work. The workflow is to export to the file system instead, using an Output Multi node for Cryptomatte-generating nodes.

Export details matter, too. Cryptomatte needs EXR for multi-channel properties and uses only lossless compression, and it warns against lossy formats such as DWAA, DWAB, or PXR24. That is a lot of words to say: keep your IDs clean, keep them in one sequence, and do not turn your matte export into a science project with ten folders named “final_final_3_forreal_v02”. Unless you enjoy that sort of thing. Some people collect stamps, after all.

Performance, stability, and the stuff you notice at 2 a.m.

Silhouette 2026 includes performance and playback improvements through ML node caching for several ML nodes, plus predictive playback via pre-fetching and batched render jobs. Playback controls add optimisation options, including adjustable job queue size, preload frames, and threading settings.

Daily workflow improvements include advanced node search with category, intent, and data-type filtering, a Favourites node, an improved naming system, a context-sensitive HUD, and a Safe Mode troubleshooting workflow to enhance stability in demanding environments.

This is the kind of feature that helps the person who inherits your comp at the worst possible time. If your node tree looks like it was assembled during an earthquake, you still have to deliver, so better search and safer startup modes are not flashy, but deeply production-friendly. Yes, you should still test new tools and innovations before use in production, especially when ML models and GPU caching sit in the critical path.

Pipeline automation and AI assistants, now with actual plumbing

The most pipeline-forward change is a built-in JSON-RPC server and an MCP server. The JSON-RPC server allows studios to drive Silhouette remotely, execute Python code, run script files, and control the application via JSON-RPC.

A Python Package Manager manages third-party Python packages inside a directory in Silhouette and stays isolated from the system Python. This is powerful, and it is also the kind of feature that deserves a boring rollout plan. Build guardrails, keep permissions sane, and do not let the intern’s chatbot become the new show supervisor. The intern already has enough power.

The MCP server allows direct calls from AI assistants, which can inspect projects, build node trees, edit shapes and keyframes, and render frames. “ChatGPT, explain what I did there!” is now a valid question that can be answered. Not truthfully or understandably, because … LLMs, but still.

What to watch to get productive fast

If you want a training rabbit hole, the Silhouette training and tutorial ecosystem lives in the video library and training hub on the BorisFX-site, spanning both quick tips and longer courses on all packages and levels of experience.

Pricing and availability

Silhouette is available as a standalone application and as a plugin, with subscription, upgrade, support, and permanent license options. Subscriptions start at $ 545 per year or $ 103 per month. Silhouette supports macOS, Windows, and Linux. Supported host applications include Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Foundry Nuke, Blackmagic Resolve and Fusion, and Autodesk Flame.

Customers with an active Silhouette subscription, Boris FX Suite subscription, or an active Silhouette upgrade and support plan receive the 2026.5 release directly as a update.


https://borisfx.com/products/silhouette/

The post Silhouette 2026 gets smarter roto and 3D heads first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: DaVinci Resolve is an NLE plus color grading plus compositing and audio in one app, with Fusion tools and a Studio tier called DaVinci Resolve Studio.

Resolve Stills stop skating around

Blackmagic Design pushed DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 with a fairly specific mission: make small things stop being annoying. On the Photo page, Resolve FX behave more reliably when you transform still images. Resize or reposition a photo with an effect applied, and the overlays and on screen controls now stay aligned so you can keep adjusting instead of chasing UI handles.

The update also improves transparency handling for effects on stills, remembers effect favourites between launches, and fixes warper tool behaviour on photos for more accurate reshaping and manipulation. Also in the stills corner, Canon CR2 and CR3 highlights now render more accurately. Bright areas should keep a more natural look and no longer appear darker than expected when grading or compositing.

Fusion keyframes, meet the timeline

On the Edit and Cut pages, the keyframe editor now supports Fusion motion paths and other modifiers. That means you can tweak animation curves, motion paths, and linked parameters from Fusion titles, effects and macros right next to timeline keyframes, instead of bouncing between editors and hoping you clicked the same parameter twice. It is a fiine quality of life win for anyone who lives on the keyframe lane.

Resolve Studio AI gets a cosmetic touch up

For DaVinci Resolve Studio users, AI CineFocus has improved visual quality for shallow depth of field simulation. Better and Faster modes now handle subtle blur more cleanly, with reductions in edge shimmer, stair stepping and halos so subjects separate more naturally from backgrounds.

AI beauty tools also get refinement. The blemish removal tool allows greater precision for facial area so corrections stay focused where needed, and the face refinement tool now better supports alpha layer workflows, helping isolate and track facial adjustments with less manual masking.

Immersive and raw handling: small, useful plumbing

Beta 4 adds support for Insta360 native colorspace, plus improved DNG decode handling with color value and profile look table support for more consistent image reproduction. DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 is available as a free download. As always, test any new beta build on a copy of a project before you let it anywhere near a real delivery.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com

The post DaVinci Resolve 21 Public Beta 4 is out first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Levels is a free browser utility for quick grayscale map prep that can feed any DCC or engine, with code hosted on GitHub by artofpilgrim.

A small tool for the most common annoyance

Levels positions itself as a texture alpha studio in the browser. You drop in an image, dial in a black and white channel mix, adjust brightness and contrast, shape the result with a levels curve, then finish with a perspective or rectangular crop. After that, you copy to clipboard or download a PNG. This kind of workflow hits daily production reality, especially when you need a quick mask for foliage, decals, grime breakup, or anything else that starts life as a photo and ends up as a grayscale control map for shading. It also pairs neatly with a texture painting pass later, when a rough mask graduates into something worth polishing.

Channel mixing, then levels, then stop touching it

The channel mixer in Levels offers six color sliders: reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magentas. It includes presets for Default, High contrast, Dark sky, Infrared, Red filter, and Stark grunge. The goal stays simple: separate subject from background quickly, then lock in contrast.

Brightness and contrast sit as a linear legacy Photoshop pre-stage applied before Levels. The levels panel shows a histogram and gives input shadow, midtone, and highlight handles plus output black and white handles. Keyboard navigation covers Tab to focus a handle, arrow keys to nudge, and Shift plus arrow for bigger steps.

If you need to keep colour instead of converting to black and white, colour mode bypasses the conversion and applies Levels, brightness and contrast per channel. Invert sits there too, because every mask workflow eventually asks you to flip it and see if your brain calms down.

Crop tools that fix your reference photo lies

Rectangular crop supports free or locked aspect ratios: 1:1, 4:5, 5:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2, and 2:3. Holding Shift while dragging forces 1:1. Perspective crop lets you drag four corners of a quad to deskew a region into a rectangle. It uses bilinear sampling, includes a rule of thirds alignment grid, shows live output size, and supports 1 pixel and 10 pixel keyboard nudging. It also composes with rectangular crop, and Reset preserves the pre perspective crop.

That combination makes Levels useful beyond the obvious leaf cutout. It is a quick way to extract alhpa style grayscale sources from angled reference shots that you would otherwise fix in a heavier editor, then stash into a texture library for reuse.

Shortcuts and export that respect your time

Levels supports a real time preview. Hold Space to compare against the original image before processing, after any crop or perspective. Inputs can arrive via drag and drop, paste from clipboard, or open from disk. Exports can go straight to clipboard or to a PNG download. Exports render from the current settings even when the preview defers for responsiveness.

Shortcuts include Space for compare, I to toggle invert, Ctrl or Command plus C to copy, and Ctrl or Command plus S to download PNG. Enter and Escape apply or cancel inside crop or perspective mode. Double click resets a slider to default.

The repository also states that inputs over 4096 pixels on the long edge get downscaled with a toast notice. That limit matters if you expect full resolution scan handling, so treat it as a deliberate constraint, not a surprise feature.

Under the hood, it stays refreshingly unprecious

The GitHub repository describes a no-build step setup. It loads React 18 and ReactDOM from a CDN, and keeps the rest as plain JavaScript split into three ordered script tags.

The file layout is a index.html as shell that links CSS and the three JS files, styles.css for styles, image.js for image processing functions and presets, components.js for UI components, and app.js for the app component and DOM boot. The three JS files communicate via a window.Levels namespace with image.js populating math and data first, then components.js reading it and adding panels, then app.js rendering.

Running locally opens index.html in a modern browser, with the file protocol working for sibling script files. For touch pointer and clipboard testing, serving over HTTP using python -m http.server from the repo root is advisable

This is the part that makes it easier to keep a known good utility around. The tool does not demand a build chain just to exist, which is exactly what you want from a graysacle helper app that should still run when the rest of your stack changes.

Thomas Pilgrim Butters released Levels this week, and describes it as a simpler alternative to opening Adobe Photoshop for alpha textures, with support for alpha masks, height or roughness maps, and stylised monochrome plates from photo references. Thomas Pilgrim Butters is Lead Weapon and Prop Artist at Facepunch and an instructor at Gnomon.

https://artofpilgrim.github.io/levels/

https://github.com/artofpilgrim/levels

The post Levels cleans up alpha maps fast first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Evans Research Associates is running a study on the needs of german video software users. The survey takes about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how you answer, and results get reported only in aggregate form. No need to hold back anything.

If you worked in german post long enough, you know how these surveys go. Someone somewhere tries to map real world workflows onto tidy multiple choice boxes, then discovers that editors, assistants, finishing artists, and producers all use the same words to mean different things. That mismatch is exactly why it helps when working pros fill these out.

Since this is a large multiyear survey, focused on German video pros, you might not fit the profile – I certainly don’t know how to match the target group. But after the introductory questions, you still take part in the prize drawing. Even when you are to CG for editing questions ;)

The survey (in German) starts here
https://asurveys.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/9d5/ado19011?list=31&LID=4

Money, vouchers, and who gets what

If you belong to the requested participant group and answer the questions, there is a Amazon gift voucher worth 15 euro for the first 250 people who complete the survey.

Also, the survey includes a separate prize draw list: one 500-euro voucher, two 200-euro vouchers, five 80-euro vouchers, and twenty-five 20-euro vouchers. If you already took part, the invitation asks you to ignore this – you already count for the draw. If the screening questions indicate you are not in the intended target group, you still enter the draw.

Confidentiality

Your answers remain strictly confidential, combined with other participants, and reported only as an overall result. If you have strong opinions about what slows you down, this is one of the rare moments where a checkbox might actually travel upward.

Rules link: https://www.evansresearch.net/NLE/rules2.php?list=31
Contact link: https://www.evansresearch.net/NLE/contact2.php?list=31
Privacy link: https://www.evansres.com/german

The post Click Here If You’re a German video editor and have yelled “Why? Why? Why?” at your NLE first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Remove goes local

Adobe Photoshop 27.7 adds an on-device AI model option for the Remove tool. After the model download, object removal can run locally without cloud processing. You can download, cancel, or remove the model whenever you want, and Photoshop checks hardware compatibility automatically before it starts. You can also switch between cloud and on-device processing.

In the on-device Remove workflow, Photoshop exposes a Device option for generative AI processing, and the model download is roughly 5 GB. If the Device option stays unavailable, the documented behavior is that the system does not meet the minimum requirements for the model. The net effect for artists is simple: you get a loacl option for Remove when you cannot, or do not want to, round-trip to the cloud.

So far no information if that still uses AI-credits in one way or another.

Boards, now with fewer copy-pastes

Photoshop 27.7 tightens integration with Firefly Boards in a few practical places. You can share any Photoshop document directly to Firefly Boards, either by creating a new board or adding to an existing one, from the Share panel and the Export menu.

Firefly Boards also appears as a destination inside the Variations panel for moodboarding and comparing AI-generated variations. When you generate image variations with Ideate in Firefly Boards, you can open those variations in a preconfigured Board layout for further exploration and iteration. New guided workflows target moodboards and visual concepts, branding and marketing assets, and social media content.

Credits and account controls move into the room

Photoshop 27.7 expands access to premium generative AI features for eligible subscribers. Existing generative credits can now be used across both standard and premium generative AI features. Photoshop also adds a Unified Account Menu in the Edit workspace, where you can view and manage account and subscription details, plus generative credits.

Small workflow fixes that add up

Save for Web gets a modernized interface intended to match the rest of Photoshop more closely. File handling and preferences get two quality-of-life toggles. You can open JPEG files as a regular layer instead of a locked background layer. You can also create new documents without a default background layer, starting with a transparent canvas.

Under the hood, the internal Metrics module is refactored to focus on heavy-use metrics, with the stated goal of reducing telemetry overhead and improving responsiveness during normal operation. Canvas HUD diagnostics move out of the canvas context area and into the View menu.

Fix-wise, Photoshop addresses a customer-reported issue where Hue and Saturation ranges did not update when selecting a prominent color preset from the Properties panel. On Windows, it also fixes an inability to launch versions 26.2 and 25.12.1 simultaneously. The Open JPEG without Background layer preference now defaults to off to avoid confusing existing users, and the Learn More URL in the generative credits quota exhausted notification is updated.

What to test before you bet a deadline on it

On-device Remove changes performance, storage, and review habits in a way that only shows up in your own shot types, textures, and delivery constraints. Test new builds and new AI paths before you roll them into production, especially if you need strict repeatability across machines and artists.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/desktop/whats-new/photoshop-on-desktop-release-notes.html

The post Adobe Photoshop 27.7 runs Remove on device first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the movie: Chrysalis is a surreal short film by Robin Lochmann blending live action with CG, built in Cinema 4D, rendered in Octane Render, and finished in After Effects, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

Who, what, and why this fog would not quit

DP: For the people in the back row exporting the wrong folder, who are you and what do you make?

Robin Lochmann: I am a Berlin-based filmmaker and 3D artist from Ireland. My work ranges from commercials to concert visuals, trailers and art projects and anything in between. My latest short film Chrysalis blends live action footage with digitally created characters and environments. You can find me at robinlochmann.com and linktr.ee/robin_lochmann.

DP: How did Chrysalis start, script first or vibes first?

Robin Lochmann: The film grew out of a series of visual experiments where I started to create characters and see what they looked like when integrated into real landscape footage that I shot. This is obviously the opposite of starting with a script and then creating the visuals. I was very motivated by combining the different techniques that I had learned and the resources that I had to create something on my own and push myself to make it look as seamless as possible.

DP: Where did you grab the real world plates, and what kicked it off on location?

Robin Lochmann: I was in the south of France with my Blackmagic Design camera and I just started shooting landscape shots. I find that being in a new place with a camera just creates options all of a sudden and is great for inspiration. The characters were the next step but the starting point was definitely the landscape. The project started in France back in 2023. I got a bunch of usable material before proper winter settled in. I came back about six months later, in the summertime, and did another round of shooting, this time with the drone. I chucked it into DaVinci Resolve for editing and colour correction, started organising everything by what might make sense together, and did a first pass at matching the colours of the two different cameras and seasons with very different lighting conditions.

Scope, time, and the luxury budget known as free time

DP: How long did you live with this project, and did you ever ghost it for a while?

Robin Lochmann: The project spanned over 3 years, but I did not work on it consistently. I still had to manage client work and regular life. At one point, there were about 10 months in a row where I did not open the project at all because I did not have any time. After taking longer breaks from it, it was always hard to pick it back up again, but I am stuck with it.

DP: Before the plot showed up, what did you actually know? Any hard rules, or just “please look slightly holy and slightly terrifying”?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a script at this point, just a visual direction. I knew I wanted to integrate animated characters into the landscape, that they would be doing this ritual, and that there would be a procession.

DP: Where did the costume language come from?

Robin Lochmann: I started collecting images of religious and ceremonial robes and headpieces with a similar vibe. I wanted to contrast the religious feeling with leather straps and mix those opposing aesthetics.

DP: The main head shape feels oddly familiar, in a good way. What fed that silhouette?

Robin Lochmann: I love the look of the alchemist character in The Holy Mountain. That and a Catholic bishop’s hat, a miter, were the original inspiration for the main character’s head design. I wanted the shape to feel somewhat familiar but still unique, with a strong profile where the front is much longer than the back, almost like a shield.

DP: Any research rabbit holes you wish you could bill to a client?

Robin Lochmann: I looked at a bunch of other different religious practices, which was not particularly useful for the project in the end.

DP: What kept you from quietly deleting the folder and moving on?

Robin Lochmann: Honestly, I did not know it would take this long when I started. At some point, I had invested enough time into it that I thought I could not give up now. Maybe if I had really known how much was still ahead of me I would have given up. But I would always get motivated when I saw a new shot come together, and that would sustain me for a while.

DP: Money question, was there a budget, or just stubbornness?

Robin Lochmann: I did not have a budget, just my free time.

Tools, tracking, and the pipeline

DP: Give us the big picture workflow, from camera to final file, without pretending it was always tidy.

Robin Lochmann: Shoot real footage, first edit, 3D-track selected shots, build characters and environments in 3D, animate characters and simulate clothing, integrate 3D elements into tracked footage, render, and composite CGI with real footage.

DP: What apps did the heavy lifting, and which ones did you bounce between when nobody was watching?

Robin Lochmann: Cinema 4D was the main hub for everything, Octane Render handled all rendering, ZBrush sculpted the dog and bug characters, iClone handled base character animation and motion capture clean up, Rokoko provided motion capture, Marvelous Designer handled cloth simulation, and Substance 3D Painter handled texturing. I composited in After Effects, then finished editorial, colour grading and final delivery in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

DP: Motion wise, how much was keyframed suffering versus mocap suffering?

Robin Lochmann: About half of the film is animated by hand in iClone. That was probably the most time consuming part of the whole project. About halfway through I got a Rokoko smart suit. It lets you record body movement and transfer it to any 3D character. It still needs a lot of cleanup, but it provides a great base and definitely speeds up the process.

DP: Clothing question for anyone who has ever rage-quit a sim cache. How did you build the garments?

Robin Lochmann: I used Marvelous Designer. I started by drawing the pattern in 2D and found it helpful to look at actual tailor patterns for reference. Then I positioned the pieces around the character, sewed it together, and ran the simulation. In some cases I added top stitching lines and simulated again so the garment movement followed the character animation. Different fabric types like canvas or silk drape very differently and give different results.

Rigging: stilts, metal, and non standard creature logic

DP: The creatures look like they refuse to behave in a normal rig. How did you build and rig them without losing your mind?

Robin Lochmann: Both the dog and the bug characters are built from scratch through a combo of modelling in Cinema 4D and sculpting in ZBrush. The bug was actually pretty easy to rig, but maybe not really a standard way of doing it. I am no expert and do not have a sculpting background, so I was winging it and pushing and scraping until it took shape. I painted it in Substance Painter, which feels similar to Photoshop with layers and masks. I added wings, bones for the legs, head sculpt variations to blend between, and a joint chain through the center of the head to make it wiggly. I animated the wings and added slight bends to the body. A shot with the bug trapped inside the jar ended up being one of my favorites.

For the dog, I used the quadruped rig in Cinema 4D as a starting point, but it was a little tricky because the dog is on stilts. Also, some of the metal bodies needed to stay rigid, so I constrained that separately.

DP: The robot dog is doing a lot. Where did that idea come from, and why the wonderfully impractical stilts?

Robin Lochmann: The initial inspiration came from a sculpture I saw in the Louvre in Paris. I liked the idea of a robot animal wearing a mask and the odd, impractical idea of having it on stilts. I wanted it to look cobbled together from scrap metal and discarded parts, barely held together by a rusty frame. I made a rig for it in Cinema 4D so I could animate it. I wanted the movement to feel janky and strenuous, like the rustiness holds it back a little bit.

World building, forests, and staying sane

DP: How much is plate based, and how much is full CG?

Robin Lochmann: Roughly half of Chrysalis uses real background footage and the other half is fully CG.

DP: When you go full CG, what does a scene build look like?

Robin Lochmann: I built the environments in Cinema 4D and made two main forest sets. Once they were finished, I could move a virtual camera around and frame like in the real world. I would do a previs first as a basic render for timing and camera movement, then refine and add details before final rendering with Octane.

DP: Lighting-wise, how did you get the France vibe into the CG shots?

Robin Lochmann: I made 360-degree HDRI images in France as a starting point to light the scene. That was rarely enough by itself, so I added extra area lights and a fog volume, basically a big box of fog that sits on top of the scene and breaks up how light particles shine through it.

DP: Any survival tips for reopening giant environment files without screaming?

Robin Lochmann: Try to stay organised in big environment scenes, so when you open the project again, you do not completely lose your mind.

DP: When it was time to hit render, what did you spit out for comp, and what passes mattered?

Robin Lochmann: I rendered everything in Octane. I used EXRs with beauty, cryptomate, volume, and Z-depth passes for each shot. That was usually enough for compositing. Because I was rendering locally on a 2080 and a 3090, I would usually just render overnight but at the very end I had about one week of nonstop rendering.

Then, everything came together for compositing and final adjustments in After Effects. Because I had the cryptomasks, I could select every object separately for small color or brightness tweaks and add CG elements to real footage. Edges are a dead giveaway, so I used light wrap to bleed background light into the foreground edges. I also added haze and sometimes more fog, took down digital sharpness, and added a bit of film grain while obsessing over small details to balance the image.

DP: What did you deliver in the end, and how wild were the render times shot to shot?

Robin Lochmann: 4k 24fps. Render times varied a lot. Some shots, where it was just one character that would later be composited onto real footage, rendered quickly while the fullCG scenes took much longer. Because I was rendering on the go, at night, it is really hard to say how long the total render times were.

Sound: music first, then realism on top

DP: Who made it sound expensive, and how did you brief them without writing a novel?

Robin Lochmann: Music by Robot Koch and sound design and mixing by Philippe Glandien. Throughout working on the project, I would listen to Robot Koch’s music while watching playbacks and I knew that I wanted him to do the music for the film. I sent him a locked edit and gave him some guidelines, but I already trusted his taste and style.

After just two revisions teh music was locked down. For the sound design, I gave Philippe Glandien the film with the final music. I wanted to aim for realism. The sound design should just support the visuals and make the film feel more tactile, while the music was the emotional heartbeat.

Updates mid project: the good, the bad, and the crashy

DP: Over three years, updates happen. Which upgrades were helpful, and which ones tried to eat your project?

Robin Lochmann: Because the project went on so long, I did have to update most tools along the way. The worst was After Effects. The number of crashes kept increasing, and by the end I could not even close the project without it crashing. Some updates in Cinema 4D were really useful, like their particle system and the updated cloth simulations.

I used these cloth simulations to tear the cocoon and the main character’s wings directly inside Cinema 4D. To control where cloth breaks, you can paint a vertex map, allowing tearing to occur precisely. For the cocoon emergence, I layered different versions so they pushed up from underneath and broke at various points, with layers reacting to each other and different physical properties.

DP: And the white webbing lines that creep over things? How did you do that?

Robin Lochmann: I shot particles at the object and traced the particle path to form a line. The particles split and form new particles. I used the same technique in a couple of shots where white webbing covers everything.

DP: If you rebuilt the character pipeline today, what would you streamline first?

Robin Lochmann: Some of the workflows were also not the most efficient *cough* in terms of bouncing between the different tools, especially for the characters. Bringing them from motion capture to cleanup, clothing, and then back into C4D to remove the base and attach the head involved too many steps. I am not a coder, so I had to do it all manually, but I think now I would try to use AI to write a script to automate it.

DP: Any deleted scenes you still mourn, or are they safely buried in a folder called OLD_FINAL_FOR_REAL_THIS_TIME?

Robin Lochmann: I made early test shots to see how the parts combined. None of those shots ended up in the film. In earlier versions there were other characters I built and then cut out, like a giant baby statue, an awful kid, and a mask. I even finished a couple of scenes with one character, then went to the cinema to see Dune 2 and saw characters so similar that I decided to remove that character completely.

DP: You skipped the festival waiting game at first. What was the thinking, and what happened after you hit publish?

Robin Lochmann: I decided to skip festivals at first and go straight online, mainly because I did not want to wait so long to share it. I am really glad I made that decision. Even with a decent festival run, you are lucky to have a couple of thousand people see your film. Two weeks after release, we had already gotten over 100k views on YouTube just organically. That was way more than I expected, since not many people want to watch short films. The feedback has been great. I am also submitting it to some smaller festivals now that do not disqualify films that are already publicly available.

DP: Last one. When did you stop tweaking and let it leave the nest, or the render farm, whichever hurts more?

Robin Lochmann: Sometimes all you need is a deadline. Right up until it was being screened, I was still tweaking details that nobody else would ever notice. Then, when the time was up, I was happy to let it go. I think only you can decide for yourself when it is finished; nobody else can make that decision for you.

https://www.robinlochmann.com/

The post Chrysalis first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the studio: Lux Aeterna delivers documentary and natural history VFX including CG environments, FX, and compositing, and it mixes scanned data with CG for shows made with broadcasters and streamers.

History likes receipts

Historical reconstruction only works when the images carry the same authority as the research. The studio leans on archaeological reference, field documentation, and specialist feedback to keep reconstructions grounded, especially when the brief asks for ancient humans that look plausible in stills and in sequence work.

Two recent projects show how far that approach goes. Secrets of the Neanderthals needed a cave interior rebuild and physical remains that read like real bones. Human pushed further, asking for early human avatars built from actor scans and refined against scientific consultation, plus maps and timelines driven by datasets.

Bones first, drama second

For the Neanderthal work, the team recreated the interior of Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, the site of one of the largest ever discoveries of Neanderthal remains. It used a mix of reference drawings, photographs, and expert advice from professors at the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University to guide accuracy, including cases where remains had been damaged or moved from their original positions.

Skeleton placement used inverse kinematics so the bones could interact with the ground in a natural way. The pipeline also dealt with scan data arriving as a 3D point cloud, then converting it into polygons that could support a usable cave reconstruction. That conversion problem tends to separate demo reels from production, because bad meshing reads instantly, even when the camera does not linger.

Point clouds, polygons, and the cave that ate your schedule

The cave build started with LiDAR scans that came in as a 3D point cloud. The team developed algorithms to convert the points into polygons for the reconstruction, then used Houdini to isolate areas of scan data so the mesh could be assembled and recombined like a 3D jigsaw. That kind of procedure-heavy work sits squarely in the Houdini mindset: build repeatable ops, then iterate until the scan stops looking like scan data and starts looking like a place.

The result aims for a CG environment that matches the real location closely enough that it can carry the weight of the story, while also supporting the additional CG work needed for the remains and the shot context. In a documentary pipeline, that matters because the images often sit right next to photography, maps, and archive material, with no cinematic lighting trickery to hide behind.

Lux Aeterna delivered 60 shots for a single series, and that number matters because it hints at the production scale when planning resources. WE might e talking about geological and evolutionary tiespans in the story, but delivery is far more rapid.

Full bodies: photogrammetry, casting, and millimetre arguments

The later project asked for historically accurate avatars built from scans of real performers, refined with skeletal research and scientific input. It was a five-part series produced by BBC Studios Science Unit for the BBC and PBS NOVA, hosted by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, and it frames visual effects as a way to tell a story spanning hundreds of thousands of years without a written record.

The workflow combined ultra-high-resolution body scans with iterative model refinements guided by BBC Studios and scientific advisors. It worked with London-based scanning studio Sample & Hold, which describes custom head and body photogrammetry systems and a photogrammetry robot for objects. In practice, that puts photogrammetry into the same category as any other acquisition step: controlled capture, predictable output, and a pipeline that can survive the boring parts like data cleanup and repeat scans.

The stated goal was four historically accurate avatars representing Jebel Irhoud, Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, and Homo erectus, based on scientific data and real-world actors. Alongside the character work, the project also required prehistoric environments and landscapes to show migration and later disappearance of early human life across the globe. The work targets ancient humans, but it does not tolerate ancient guesswork.

Maps, timelines, and the part nobody notices until it breaks

A second strand of the work focused on animated maps and timelines that visualised migration, development, and disappearance across millennia. The graphics are being built using datasets provided by BBC Studios Science Unit researchers and scientific consultants, and not as speculative graphics.

One specific challenge involved changing coastlines and submerged landmasses, where the team created transitions and overlays to keep the visuals clear while staying scientifically accurate. That is the kind of “small” work that carries a lot of editorial risk: the map has to be readable, the timing has to serve the cut, and the choices have to stay consistent across episodes.

On the delivery scale, the project description states sixty crafted shots across five hour-long episodes, and it frames the approach as avoiding prosthetics and overly stylised effects while using a hybrid of photogrammetry, consultation, and minimalist Compositing.

What to take away if you do this for a living

If your job involves building reconstructions that sit next to real-world evidence, the takeaway is simple: acquisition quality and reference discipline decide how much time you spend “fixing” later. Scan data arrives noisy, research notes arrive detailed, and schedules arrive optimistic. The pipeline has to translate all three into images that read as plausible without distracting from the content. And as always, test any new workflow, plugin, or automation step on a throwaway shot before you bet a delivery on it. Just like with rare fossils, you don’t want to play loose with the materials.

https://www.lavfx.com/
https://www.lavfx.com/secrets-of-the-neanderthals
https://www.lavfx.com/blog/human

P.S. You have NO idea how big the challenge was not to replace “Ancient Humans” and “Prehistoric” with the users of one ore more DCC-packages….

The post Lux Aeterna rebuilds ancient humans first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Motion designer Mike Gaynor built Caddis over four months in nights and weekends, and pitched it as the layer timeline you already know paired with a node graph inside every single layer.

Work starts in a familiar stack of layers, with keyframes and timing edits on a timeline. Select a layer and its node contents appear in a graph panel beside the timeline and viewport. The idea is to avoid choosing a single paradigm when motion work often lives between both. Inside that per-layer grahp, the beta already includes more than 100 nodes to wire together. Nodes can drive parameters directly, with examples like linking rotation to scale, scale to audio, and audio to color.

Caddis Layers can stay simple, or turn fully procedural

A layer can stay as basic as one line of text, or expand into a fully procedural build with fields, shapes, video, and audio flowing through it. The demo frames it like patching a modular synth, with links between values, movement, and math. The product site leans into the same concept with a promise of visual logic in place of expressions, and a workflow where every parameter becomes something you can wire, modulate, or replace. It also positions the node graph as the home for compositing work like blending, masking, and mattes. Color tokens appear in the demo as a way to recolor a whole project in one click. The demo also shows saving subgraphs as recipes, then reusing or sharing them as a single file.

Responsive comps, plus GPU-native rendering

The demo says designs can be responsive, showing a resize from 16 by 9 to 9 by 16 with the layout adapting on its own. Caddis describes itself as a native desktop app on a modern GPU pipeline. The website calls out GPU-native rendering, aiming for a responsive viewport while iterating, and exports without leaving the tool. Treat that as a marketing claim until your own workstation agrees. Either way, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally on real shots, real deadlines, and at least one truly cursed client change request. Beta is coming, so we obviously haven’t tried it yet – sign up as well, we’ll learn together what actually appears when Caddis comes out.

Import and export reality check

Caddis positions itself as an alternative rather than a drop-in replacement for After Effects and does not import After Effects projects. Instead, it works by importing media and rebuilding comps inside the app. On export, the product site lists standard formats including Apple ProRes, MP4, and image sequences including H.264 and ProRes, plus PNG and OpenEXR image sequences, and standard web formats. The demo additionally names WebM and GIF, plus PNG sequences, as native.

Caddis Pricing, beta status, and platform notes

Caddis is free during beta. The product site lists a $99 launch price for early adopters and $129 regular pricing, positioned as a one-time purchase with no subscription. The software should be compatible with macOS 12.0 or later, with a Windows version due shortly after launch. If you plan to roll it into a pipeline, assume the usual early-tool homework: bake out deliverables, double-check colour management expectations, and confirm the layer graph behaviour does not change between beta waves.

https://www.caddis.app/

The post Caddis mixes layers with nodes per layer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Boris FX Sapphire is a multi host VFX plug-in suite for editors and compositors, used in After Effects, Premiere, Media Composer, and OpenFX hosts like Resolve, Flame, and Nuke.

Defocus that tries to behave like glass

Boris FX ships Sapphire 2026.5 with a new effect called Advanced Defocus, built to recreate lens blur character rather than just blur pixels. In Sapphire, artists can start from presets, including ones built from real-world lens references and more stylised options, then dial in Defocus Width plus relative width and height for anamorphic style stretching.

Advanced Defocus focuses on the lens kernel, where artists shape bokeh as circles, polygons with adjustable sides and roundness, or custom shapes. It also includes controls to introduce imperfections tied to aperture blades, such as adjustable blade notches, as well as options for colour fringing and noise. The tool targets everything from cheap, dirty glass to high-end primes, depending on how far you push those controls.

The lens vignette section adds classic edge darkening, but also an optcial vignette control that changes distortion toward the frame edges. A Matte Box control goes past soft cropping by simulating uneven light entry, slightly darkening one side while also clipping individual defocused highlights.

From grungy to clean

Advanced Defocus also includes lens textures that break up overly uniform bokeh, with parameters that range from subtle variation to grungy lens looks. Extra controls include highlight boosting, chromatic-style fringing, and grain management to match the foreground and background.

In Adobe After Effects, Advanced Defocus appears under Effect in the Sapphire Blur plus Sharpen category. The effect can work as a straight lens emulation pass, a stylised motion graphics treatment, or a transition building block. A workflow shown in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Fusion uses Advanced Defocus to soften a keyed background for more believable depth, then adds sensor-style grain to help match elements. Another workflow in After Effects links defocus controls across layers, uses Affect Alpha to defocus type with the background, and offsets values to keep the illusion that typography sits closer to camera.

For edits, Advanced Defocus can also drive transitions inside VEGAS Pro by building an S Transition in the Sapphire Builder variant designed for transitions. That approach ties animation to the transition length on the timeline rather than keyframing, and then applies the same peak values to both incoming and outgoing clips.

Glare gets a rebuild, and flares get louder

Sapphire 2026.5 reworks S_Glare with smoother rendering, richer spectral color, and updated parameters including highlight isolation, cleaner rays, and more natural falloff, plus new styles that widen the look range beyond traditional glare.

In Adobe After Effects, S_Glare sits under the Lighting category and behaves the same across Sapphire hosts. The first control to touch is Threshold: raise it for fewer glares, lower it for more, and expect wildly different results depending on the footage. Sapphire 2026.5 also changes what the defaults look like compared with older versions, so the same effect can start from a different baseline than legacy installs.

Presets matter a lot for S_Glare, but the preview can mislead. Results change with viewer zoom level, so checking at 100 percent gives a more reliable read before you commit. Presets also store Threshold, so loading a preset often means rebalancing Threshold right away to avoid either nothing happening or everything exploding.

If glares drift or slip onto areas you do not want, Threshold Blur becomes the other big lever. Lowering Threshold Blur picks up many more points of interest, which can reduce slippage but may add jitter. A practical balancing rule shown here is: when Blur comes down, Threshold goes up, then you fine-tune from there.

Sapphire includes integrated Mocha inside the effect for masking control. A workflow shown here uses an object brush and Mask ML to generate a mask, then inverts the Mocha mask so glare stays in the scene but stops emanating from a subject.

S_Glare also appears as an embedded component in S_NightSky, where you can open the glare editor, load glare presets, and adjust glare size to customise the look directly within the NightSky effect.

Procedural ridges, more presets, faster stacking

A new Texture Ridges effect generates ridge-like patterns from noise, with controls for octave scaling, speed, frequency, contrast, and layering to build animated surface detail and abstract motion design textures. Sapphire 2026.5 also adds more than 100 new and improved presets, including anime, sci-fi, and abstract fractal motion graphics looks.

Effect Builder gets an interface update aimed at faster custom effect and transition creation, plus new built-in Dots and Noise tools. If you build stacks for repeatable looks, this is the part worth a quiet test session before you let it touch client shots.

Pricing and updates

Sapphire ships as a plug-in collection with subscriptions, upgrade and support plans, and perpetual licenses. Subscriptions start at 545 US dollars per year or 80 US dollars per month. Customers with current Sapphire or Boris FX Suite subscriptions, or with Sapphire upgrade and support plans, get the 2026.5 release obviously as a free update. If you aren’t sure: get the free Trialversion. As always, test new tools and presets in your own pipeline before you rely on them in production.

https://borisfx.com/products/sapphire/#whats-new

The post Boris FX Sapphire 2026.5 adds Advanced Defocus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In this video we will explore how we can simulate realistic “kick up dust” from wind that is blowing over a surface in Maxons Cinema 4Ds internal Pyro simulation tool. The most likely use case is the effect you probably know from a helicopter taking of or landing.
As I learned yesterday, this effect is known as “downwash”.

Learn how to solve for air pressure and use the output of the moving airfield to automatically create and simulate dust picked up from the ground and carried away by the air movement realistically.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro

00:48 Tut Overview

01:31 C4D Scene Setup: Geometry

03:02 About Pyro Solvers

04:33 Setting up a Pyro Domain

08:26 Setting up the Downwash Wind

10:33 Setting up Vectors (Velocity)

14:57 Offsetting the Collision Landscape

15:57 Caching the 1st (Base) Simulation

16:30 Setting up the Dust Emitter Vertex Map

18:33 Simulation Scene Object

20:21 Field Force

20:49 Finalizing the Downwash Sim

23:00 Looking at the Results

Download the Tut Scene by becoming a Patreon member. No matter which tier!

VIDEO RELATED LINKS:
Maxon’s Official Website: https://www.maxon.net/
Octane C4D Otoy Official Website: https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewfor…

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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a VFX artist spends too much time obsessing over pixels and lighting, well, welcome to my world! You can find all my latest experiments, tutorials, and general nerdy shenanigans here:

Website: silverwing-vfx.de
Patreon: patreon.com/SilverwingVFX (Get scenefiles for all of my tutorial scenes also while supporting me)
Instagram: instagram.com/silverwingvfx (Finished 3D projects and engagement with the community)
YouTube: youtube.com/@SilverwingVFX (Updates and news about my work and what I am up to)

And if you’re into retro gaming and deep-dive nostalgia, check out the big article I wrote for this magazine: my love letter to the legendary Game Boy. Because nothing says “true love” like an 8-bit screen and a battery life that could outlast modern smartphones.

The post C4D Pyro Tutorial: Helicopter Kickup Dust first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Raphael Rau.

For those who don’t know the tool: MoonRay is a production path tracer with a USD Hydra render delegate for tools using OpenUSD, positioned in rendering and lookdev next to ASWF staples like OpenColorIO.

The Academy Software Foundation has added MoonRay as a hosted project, keeping the renderer under foundation governance while opening contributions to a broader community. DreamWorks Animation developed MoonRay as an open source production path tracing renderer and has used it on every one of its feature films since 2019, including The Wild Robot and The Bad Guys 2. The project uses the Apache 2.0 license and is developed in C++.

MoonRay includes support for distributed rendering and a pixel matching XPU mode that processes bundles of rays on the GPU as well as the CPU. It also includes bundled path tracing and a USD Hydra render delegate for integration into content creation tools that support the OpenUSD standard, which should make interactive preview workflows less of a custom science project in teh average pipeline.

The ASWF angle

MoonRay now sits alongside other hosted efforts in the ASWF roster, including OpenEXR, OpenVDB, OpenTimelineIO, and Open Shading Language. If your facility already treats OpenColorIO as plumbing, this is the same neighborhood.

For contributors, the project points developers to openmoonray.org and to the ASWF Slack workspace for a MoonRay channel at slack.aswf.io. Documentation is published at docs.openmoonray.org, and the source repository lives under the OpenMoonRay organization on GitHub.

Keynote season meets SIGGRAPH season

ASWF Open Source Days runs in Los Angeles on July 19 to 20, 2026, and the schedule aligns with SIGGRAPH 2026 timing. The keynote comes from DreamWorks Animation CTO Bill Ballew, with a talk titled How to Train Your Renderer: MoonRay’s Journey from DreamWorks’ Dragons to the ASWF.

The event listing describes July 19 as the main program day in Los Angeles, followed by July 20 as a full day of open source Birds of a Feather sessions within SIGGRAPH. The Call for Proposals remains open through May 24, 2026, via the Open Source Days event site.

As always, test new tools and new governance setups before you bet a production schedule on them, even when the feautres list looks exactly like what your render wranglers asked for.

https://openmoonray.org/

https://www.aswf.io/

The post MoonRay Renderer joins ASWF as hosted project first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Beeble builds AI relighting and video transformation tools for VFX, post, and virtual production, and Canvas is its very new node based environment that wires SwitchX and SwitchLight into repeatable shot workflows.

A node graph, but for AI outputs you can wrangle

Canvas lands as a node based AI compositing environment aimed at complex workflows across VFX, post, and virtual production. The pitch is straightforward: put AI video models, compositing utilities, and workflow automation into one visual system so teams can iterate across multiple shots without rebuilding the same logic over and over.

In practical terms, it targets the part of the job where you already juggle plates, masks, reference stills, and multiple look directions, then repeat that dance across a sequence.

What is actually in the box

Canvas presents itself as a node graph workflow editor for final render, with a catalog grouped into Input, AI Tools, Edit, and Utility. Input supports text prompts plus image files in PNG, JPEG, or WebP, and video files in MP4 or MOV. In other words, it starts where most editorial and comp workflows already start: media in, decisions next.

https://digitalproduction.com/2026/05/20/beeble-canvas

The AI Tools section includes a node for SwitchX, the same model as the standalone product, with source and alpha handled as video inputs. It also includes an LLM node that can generate files from a prompt with up to four media inputs, plus image generation and video generation nodes that can route to external models. For rotoscoping style work, Canvas includes a Video Matte node that outputs an alpha matte plus RGBA, with an automatic mode and an interactive selection mode, plus options aimed at general footage and green screen keys.

On the classic comp side, the Edit nodes cover the expected utility moves: extract a frame, trim, crop, resize, curves, invert, flip, and morphology operations like erode and dilate. Utility nodes cover housekeeping: sticky notes, routing for cleaner graphs, a viewer, side by side compare, and export. It’s not fully Nuke yet, but…

That combination matters because it lets artists keep the media prep and look development steps next to the model calls, instead of bouncing between separate tools and hoping filenames stay honest.

Relighting and PBR passes, now wired into the graph

The system includes access to SwitchLight for generating physically based rendering passes. In the Canvas node catalog, the VFX Pass Generator extracts PBR material maps including BaseColor, Normal, Depth, Roughness, Specular, and Metallic from image or video using SwitchLight 3.0.

That puts relgihting adjacent tasks into the same graph where you also assemble mattes, feed references, and generate variations. It also matches the stated intent of supporting controllable, iterative pipelines across multiple shots, not one off experiments.

Automation, batches, and the part everyone really wants

Canvas claims to be built around repeatability: build workflows once, apply them to shot sequences, and automate iteration without rebuilding node logic shot by shot. It also calls out batch processing and maintaining scene consistency across projects.

Those claims describe the correct pain point. Anyone who has ever reconnected the same five nodes fifty times will understand why a programmable layer matters. Still, treat the automation story like any new tool claim: test it in your own pipeline with your own edge cases before you bet any delivery on it.

The API angle: SwitchX in your pipeline, with pricing details

SwitchX API for video transformations in YOUR pipeline

Alongside Canvas, the SwitchX API is positioned for studios and developers who want to integrate video transformation and relighting capabilities directly into custom pipelines and software environments.

The developer portal offers a REST style workflow with uploads, job creation, and polling, and it explicitly supports 720p and 1080p output. It also has pay as you go credits in US Dollar, and pricing can start at $0.10 per generation. That pricing applies to the API offering as described there, while Canvas pricing is not specified, since it is part of Bebble Online.

Beeble Studio: 4K AI relighting on YOUR desktop

Availability, media assets, and credits

Canvas is available now via the Beeble platform, with a launch video hosted on YouTube (The Video we embedded above…) .

The boring but necessary reminder

New tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, especially when they touch shot consistency, automation, and delivery formats. Run a small sequence through, break it on purpose, and see how it fails before you trust it on a deadline.

https://docs.beeble.ai/beeble/canvas
https://docs.beeble.ai/beeble/overview

The post Beeble Canvas first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the tool: Wacom Art Pen 2 is a rotation aware stylus for Intuos Pro, Cintiq, and MovinkPad Pro 14, with app support in Photoshop, Illustrator, Clip Studio Paint, and Krita.

The twist you actually use

Barrel rotation sounds like a party trick until you map it to something that pays rent. The Art Pen 2 sends rotational angle data, so supported brushes can react to how you twist the pen in your hand. That lets you change stroke width and character by rotation alone, closer to how a flat brush, chisel marker, or calligraphy nib behaves. This is not a new concept in digital art, but it has been oddly rare in modern stylus lineups. The practical win is fewer mode switches. Instead of bouncing between brush presets, you keep one tool and steer it with your wrist.

Specs that matter, not vibes

The pen uses battery free EMR and includes three buttons. Pressure goes up to 8,192 levels, with tilt support. There is a built in nib holder in the barrel that stores three spare nibs, so you can swap tips without digging through your desk drawer of tiny regrets.

There are three newly developed nib types: Art Pen 2 Carbon Shaft POM Nibs, Art Pen 2 POM Nibs, and Art Pen 2 Felt Nibs. The pen ships with a Carbon Shaft POM nib installed. The nibs are exclusive to the Art Pen 2 and do not interchange with Pro Pen 3 nibs. The pen also skips interchangeable button plates, grips, and balance weights.

If you relied on modular pen bodies, this is a hard line. If you only care about a stable feel and consistent response, fewer moving parts can be a feature.

Compatibility is specific, and that is good news

On hardware, the pen lists support for MovinkPad Pro 14, Intuos Pro models PTK470, PTK670, and PTK870, plus Cintiq 16 DTK168, Cintiq 24 DTK246, and Cintiq 24 touch DTH246. Cintiq Pro models DTH172, DTH227, and DTH271 are slated for support later this year.

On software, barrel rotation support depends on the app. Listed support includes Adobe Photoshop 2026, Adobe Illustrator 2026, Clip Studio Paint v4.1 or later, with v4.3 or later on Android, and Krita 5.2.14 or later. Some other apps also support barrel rotation, and more app support is planned.

Price, availability, and the fine print

The Art Pen 2 lists at $99.95 on the official store page. Availability is described as “soon”. Wacom positions this as a return of a rotation sensitive pen the community asked for.

As always, test new input gear and driver combinations before you roll them into production. Brush engines, driver updates, and app versions can interact in fun ways that only reveal themselves at 2 a.m. on delivery week.

Where this lands for post, VFX, and realtime artists

Whether that is worth it depends on your apps, your devices, and how much you already built your muscle memory around rotation driven brushes. The good news is that the compatibility lists are concrete, and the nib ecosystem is clearly separated from the Pro Pen 3 world, so you can plan purchases without guessing.

https://estore.wacom.com/en-us/wacom-art-pen-2-acp70000dz.html
https://community.wacom.com/en-us/art-pen-2/

The post Wacom Art Pen 2 does a barrel roll first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Mesh first, regrets later

Tangenten positions Puppet Pin Tool as a mesh deformation tool for the Fusion page inside DaVinci Resolve, built around a node you drop into a comp and feed with an image. The first stop is the mesh tab, where the plugin generates a triangulated mesh automatically.

Mesh generation follows the non-transparent pixels of the input, so cutouts with clean alpha give cleaner boundaries. The mesh can be adjusted with generation controls when the automatic result needs a nudge, including cases where you want tighter coverage around thin shapes or want to avoid clipping at edges. Everything else in Puppet Pin lives on top of the automatic mesh step. Pins grab vertices from that mesh, then move them around. Deformers move pins. Solvers push the rest of the vertices into place. Locators output motion data from the whole mess.

Pins: source, destination, and mseh wrestling

Pins in Puppet Pin have two positions. A source position defines where the pin grabs vertices from, and a destination position defines where those vertices get moved to.

The workflow starts in the pins tab. Adding a pin enables it and switches the viewer into source pin view so you can place it exactly where you want. After placing source pins, create controls switches the viewer into destination pin view and gives you per pin viewer controls you can drag to pose the subject.

For quick pose edits, this stays pleasantly direct: place pins on key body parts, generate controls, then pull and rotate until the silhouette behaves. The demo workflow uses four pins for a simple pose tweak, with pins on feet, hips, and neck to bend and tilt the figure.

Pin radius acts like the pin’s grip size. Increasing radius makes a pin grab and lock down more vertices, and it also enables rotation and expansion controls. Radius becomes essential once you want feet to stay planted or once secondary motion from other pins starts pushing things you intended to keep still.

Pins also include a render layer control that changes triangle render order. That makes it possible to decide which parts draw in front when pieces overlap after deformation, like choosing whether a tail renders in front of a body or behind it.

Keyframes and loops, because artists like sleep

Puppet Pin supports standard keyframing on pin controls, and the tutorial example builds a short loop by animating a neck pin across a 30 frames per second section. Two keyframes set the motion, then spline controls apply smoothing and a ping pong loop for a back and forth cycle.

This is the kind of tiny feature that saves real time. You can rough a loop from a still without opening another tool, without baking a bunch of transforms, and without manually copying and pasting keyframes to fake a cycle.

It also means Puppet Pin fits neatly into the existing Fusion animation muscle memory: set keyframes, shape curves, loop when needed, and keep moving. If you plan to drop it into a show, test the whole setup in your own comps before you trust it with client deadlines.

Deformers: follower, wave, and IK FK rigs

The deformers tab adds another layer, letting you build relationships between pins so you can animate less and get more motion for free. A follower deformer makes one or more pins follow a target pin. In the example setup, the hip pin follows the neck pin, with amplitude and delay controls creating softer secondary motion.

The post Tangenten Puppet Pin brings mesh warping to Resolve first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.