Robots Blossom – Project Update 014

You are getting the play by play as I work my way through this animation project. The twist and turns and so on. As a matter of fact, the past few days have seen some twists and turns regarding task switching. I thought I was ready to finish the jaw and eye animations over the past couple of days but, it ended up that I needed to take a couple of steps ahead in the overall project instead.

After the test color grading yesterday, I realized a couple of things. First, I probably shouldn’t judge the color grading result in DaVinci Resolve based on high resolution screenshots from the Unreal Engine 5 Viewport. I really needed to do a render through Movie Render Queue with the ACES setup for rendering (tutorial below). Second, I had a nagging feeling that I actually needed to get a complete pass of all the elements as they are into DaVinci Resolve to get a more realistic view of the final result. Meaning, get the render from UE5 as well as the audio into DaVinci Resolve, add some transitions and do a test render from DaVinci Resolve. 

I’m glad I did. The current ray traced lighting set up I have in UE5 looked a lot better when rendered properly vs the viewport screenshots. I should have known that. Yes, I could have rendered jpg from movie render queue. That would have been better than the viewport (at least the way the viewport is currently configured). I think it was best to go ahead with the exr render to get a true feel for the final result.

So that’s what I did. Screenshot below is from DaVinci Resolve. I did not do any color grading on the video. I got hung up for a bit trying to render from UE5 earlier in the day. I needed to add my level lighting to Sequencer to get it to render. Once I figured that out, it took about an hour to render at 4k resolution (3840 x 2160). Specs on my machine include an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX 3.5GHz 32 Core 280W and GeForce RTX 3090 GPU.

I am pretty sure I will be spending some time tomorrow in tutorialville watching a few color grading tutorials before taking a color grading pass. I need to level up. I still feel too limited in my color grading skillset. I will share tutorials if I find some good ones.